[Novalug] Choice of OS (was Re: Red Hat Network (RHN)...)

Beartooth beartooth@Beartooth.Info
Wed May 12 15:03:37 EDT 2010


On Wed, 12 May 2010, Peter Larsen wrote:

 	[....]
> What companies like Redhat sell isn't the software as I stated, 
> but the services.

> [....] As the cloud comes closer to being adopted, this is 
> going to change even more and IT will be a simple service a 
> company buys - like plugging in a TV. No need to hire a 
> technician to install/run anything. The IT experts will provide 
> the services as hired consultants and as 
> management/setup/configuration of the cloud to satisfy the need 
> of the clients. If this sounds a lot like IBM in the 60s and 
> 70s you're quite right. We're returning to the mainframe 
> mentality. The PC era is about as over as it can be - it was 
> fun while it lasted though. [....]

 	This reminds me of a topic -- marginal and tangential to 
the present one at best -- which I've been meaning to ask about 
somewhere.

 	Insofar as my wife has any tech support whatever, it's 
me. I run Fedora, adopting new releases a week or two after they 
appear, because that puts most of my innumerable questions and 
problems into places that lots of Alpha Plus Technoids watch; and 
it's easiest for me to keep her machine doing what she wants if 
her OS is also the one I know best.

 	She does a little email, a little web browsing, and 
quite a bit of writing. That means two or three browsers 
(Firefox, Opera and Konqueror -- under Gnome, not KDE); Alpine 
(which both of us have been using lo these twenty years gone); 
and OpenOffice. She has none of my interest in OSs nor the Net 
per se, but wants to use her machine the way both of us use our 
vehicles.

 	It becomes increasingly apparent that she'll most 
likely outlive me by a good many years. What should she run after 
my time? Would RHEL make any sense for such a user??

 	CentOS has long seemed to me the canonical choice, 
probably with EPEL enabled, but seldom used much -- and the 
release of 6.0 or soon after the canonical time. Is that 
reasonable? Should I be looking harder at Mint, for instance? 
(Ubuntu is, to me personally, analogous to KDE: somehow I just 
never get comfortable with either.)

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
Remember I know little (precious little!) of where up is.



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