Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 1/19/2011 9:13 AM, John Hodrien wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Jan 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>> CentOS would likely only be used as a desktop OS by people who also run
>>> servers and like everything to be the same. They all assemble
>>> approximately the same set of upstream packages, though, so it is
possible to make
>>> them all do the same things with varying amounts of work in finding
current
>>> packages that might be missing in the base distribution.
>>
>> I do think CentOS gets unreasonably knocked as a desktop OS. I
>> definitely don't use it on desktops *because* I run it on servers.
>>
> The difference is that open source server software has been 'feature
> complete' for ages and the standards processes that change client/server
> interactions are very, very slow - so outdated versions of server
> software is not a problem as long as bug/security fixes are made.
> 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. Personally, I use Windows at
<snip>
I'll disagree here: I've seen hardly any "improvements" in any of the
(admittedly not a lot) of software I run. As a definition of this, let me
note that in '95, PC Mag ran a review of word processors, and noted that
90% of the users (then) used only 10% of the features, and the other 10%
of users who *did* use those features only used them about 10% of the
time.
The last "oh, I like this" feature I can remember was when firefox
introduced tabs. On the other hand, a *lot* of "improvements" I find more
and more objectionable, such as thunderbird trying *very* hard to look and
act more and more like Lookout, er, Outlook, and I *LOATHE* the latest
versions of Outlook.
mark