[CentOS] Troubles for an non-IT beginner

Wed Jan 19 16:27:39 UTC 2011
John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk>

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:

> That's not true for desktop applications and environments.  If you don't
> have something current you are missing the improvements that many
> thousands of man-hours of work have made.

But I guess that's the bit I don't /always/ buy into.  In the pre-Fedora days,
upgrading every 12 months made sense because seemingly everything was just
plain better.  Things that didn't used to work now did, or font rendering was
suddenly miles ahead, or lots of significant libraries were bundled.  Then at
some point that stopped seeming to be true.  There's a whole lot of polishing
going on, but I'm not sure much of it really matters to a user of a managed
desktop.

And for every bit of juiciness you think you're getting with an upgrade,
you're getting the disruption of a reinstall or an upgrade, and seemingly for
everything that's improved there's a bug or a quirk to match.  I think the
negatives of an annually changing environment seemed to outweigh the positives
of an improved environment even when there weren't significant new
bugs/issues.

Will I move to CentOS 6 when it gets released?  Sure, and I'm sure in some
years time I'll be mighty glad I did.  Will I force all my users to move from
CentOS 5?  No way.

jh