[ale] opening distro war arch vs ubuntu

[Jay Lozier]

On 12/30/2011 04:38 PM, Brian Mathis wrote:
> 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.
I would add the comprehensiveness of the documentation/help is also 
important (Debian, Suse, Red Hat, Centos, & Ubuntu). Another item to 
consider is the availability of paid support either on an annual 
contract or per incident basis (Red Hat, Suse, & Ubuntu). Arch only has 
online documentation available. I can not comment on who has the best 
paid support, I have never used it with Linux.

The most important issues for company are the uptime and stability for 
users. I echo that most users will not care about bleeding edge rather 
care about getting work done. Thus keeping the users/system up is more 
important than any particular distro. Depending on the balance of 
regular users versus system only/network backbone would color my 
selection. Personally I prefer 'buntu's but I realize my personal 
preferences may conflict with organizational needs, i.e. Red Hat is 
often a better choice for many situations.
>
> ❧ 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
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-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com