Re: Best and most popular distros for the enterprise desktop
On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 11:57 +0200, Eero Volotinen wrote:
> 2011/3/1 John A. Sullivan III <jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com>:
> > On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 11:34 +0200, Eero Volotinen wrote:
> >> 2011/3/1 John A. Sullivan III <jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com>:
> >> > On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 11:23 +0200, Eero Volotinen wrote:
> >> > <snip>
> >> >> UBuntu lts is now very attractive to desktops, because of long support
> >> >> and it is also possible to buy support from canonical.
> >> > <snip>
> >> > That's what we first thought but it may not be what you expect. We
> >> > assumed that LTS meant that applications would be refreshed to the
> >> > latest versions and new applications would be added. If I recall
> >> > correctly, that is not true. LTS will patch bugs but will not introduce
> >> > major applications updates or new applications. Please correct me if I
> >> > am wrong - John
> >>
> >> LTS = long term support, not latest software.
> > <snip>
> > Yes, exactly, so it develops the same problem as RHEL as a desktop where
> > the applications can grow quite old for desktop usage. As server may
> > not mind a two year old version of OpenOffice or Firefox but a desktop
> > probably does - John
>
> Well, do you want stable and secure desktop or running on bleeding edge?
>
> Are you really talking about enterprise environment with over 1000+
> desktops installed?
> How about maintenance on bleeding edge software? It can be really pain in the ..
>
> --
> Eero
A balance. Fedora is too bleeding edge for an enterprise desktop, RHEL
too laggard thought outstanding for servers. That's where Debian, with
its blend of backports and selected items from testing via preferences,
strikes that balance very well for us.
There are examples besides OpenOffice. For example, we are eagerly
awaiting Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 because the HTML5 support will finally
allow multiple attachments at once in Zimbra Web Client (if I understand
it correctly). PDF editing is a nightmare in Linux but we do want to
stay abreast on the very promising pdf import in OO, well, I guess that
is OO. There are also library issues. In our environment, networked
sound was essential and we needed newer pulseaudio libraries. webDAV,
calDAV, and cardDAV support was necessary for Zimbra so we needed newer
versions of Evolution and KDEPIM. Ah, yes, knew there was more about
PDF - even PDF readers in Linux are a problem for very complicated
documents so we needed newer versions of acroread. I think that's about
all we found - John
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