[ale] opening distro war arch vs ubuntu

[Brian Mathis]

It strikes me that you should have already answered these questions
before declaring what distro you will be switching to.

Have you spoken to your sysadmins about this?  What platform is your
app deployed on in production?  Whatever it is, your dev environment
needs to match exactly, and you need to be able to make sure updates
are consistent across all systems at any point in time.

Developers seem to always want the latest and greatest, and that
generally conflicts with the goals of the other parts of an
organization, both IT and Business.  The business generally cares
about availability more than being cutting edge, since when the site
is down they cannot make money from it.

One of the most damaging things (from a systems perspective) that one
can do in a business is deploy a non-enterprise grade Linux
distribution.  This is a clear sign that the sysadmin is just a
"computer guy" who happens to get paid to tinker, as opposed to
someone who really understands the value of true systems management.

Acceptable enterprise distros are Redhat (or CentOS), Suse, and
possibly Debian.  Anything else and you are more likely making
decisions based on political or religious ideas about what is "better"
instead of any real criteria.


❧ Brian Mathis



On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Narahari 'n' Savitha
<savithari at gmail.com> wrote:
> Friends:
>
> I am about to switch from Ubuntu to Arch.  The rolling update model of arch
> suits our dev team better is what I think is good.
>
> Is anyone using Arch ?
> Anyone has had bad experience with Arch ?
> How bleeding edge is Arch ?
> How soon are fixes available in Arch usually ?
> Is AUR any better/worse than PPA ?
>
> Appreciate your input.
>
> Regards
> -Narahari