On 07/30/2013 01:19 PM, Digimer wrote: > On 30/07/13 12:39, Patrick wrote: >> I've had nothing but trouble with BSD/Linux over the past year or so. >> >> I've been on Centos 6.4 for about a half day now and I am loving it. >> >> I am just wondering though, how does a 7 year support cycle work? >> >> I see that there is libreoffice which is kinda new. Is this because open >> office is under oracle's influence? >> >> I am on gnome 2 right now, will I wake up one day in the next 7 years to >> gnome 3 ? I really don't want to. Will I just have gnome 2 + bug fixes? >> >> If so how does the community do this if the gnome people drop support >> for gnome 2. >> >> Thanks-Patrick > To expand on Mark's reply; > > CentOS is a community maintained, binary compatible version of Red Hat > Enterprise Linux. That means that, minus trademarked content, it is > identical in every way to RHEL (warts and all). Red Hat somewhat > recently announced that they were extending support from 7 years to 10 > years, too. > > Red Hat's claim to fame, and the reason for their popularity, is that > they maintain a super-stable OS. Once a major version is released, say > 6.0, all versions of all software will (almost) never change. So the > version released on 6.0 will be the same version available when the last > 6.X version is retired. This means that you never have to worry about > conflicts and faults caused by library or dependency apps changing over > time. > > As for support; Red Hat takes responsibility of maintaining *all* > applications in their OS. Of course, most issues are resolved with help > from the original authors, but they will take over if the original > project dies or significantly changes for whatever reason. > > CentOS, in the meantime, very quickly recompiles updates as they're > released from Red Hat and makes them available to their users. They do > this for all supported releases and plan to do so for the foreseeable > future. Given their past excellent track record, I personally have every > reason to trust them. So CentOS will continue to provide support for > CentOS 5 until 2017 and CentOS 6 until 2020. > > This is why RHEL and CentOS are so extremely popular in enterprise. It's > arguably the most supported and longest living release cycle in the > Linux ecosystem. > > hth > Good to know there's a reliable server/desktop OS that can withstand the long-haul! EGO II