Auris Dei

Eric Raymond has ended, as he said here on Wednesday, his thirteen-year affair with the RedHat/Fedora linux distribution. In the forum posting at the link, he embraced ubuntu 6.10, “Edgy Eft”.

RedHat/Fedora has a similar record with me. Five years or so back, I stumbled on Mandrake — I think this was around the 8.0 release — and liked it. I stayed with it until Mandriva 10.1, which was unable to complete an install on my machine — the same one on which I’d been running each new release for the preceding several years.

When ubuntu began to get some buzz, in the spring of 2005, I did a trial installation. I was immediately hooked, totally impressed by, among other things,

• the clean desktop look
• the update app “synaptic” and its supporting subsystem
• the online help/support/forums structures

With regard to synaptic and the update mechanism, in the past two years they have not failed me even once. In January of last year I installed the still-in-progress Dapper Drake release 6.06 onto one of my secondary machines, and tracked its development until the final release in June. During those five months, the system updated itself several times a week, flawlessly. I used the machine daily through this period, for non-critical work, and never had a problem.

Raymond’s post generated a longish thread of responses. Most of them tried to straddle the issues he’d raised; “right about this, wrong about that”. Some wished him good riddance from the community.

Several pointed out, quite condescendingly, that RedHat had never been aimed primarily at the desktop universe, but the enterprise. The implied logic is a little strange: forgive them their shortcomings, the distro wasn’t written for you in the first place. But what’s good about ubuntu would be good anywhere, and it trumps what’s good about Fedora, which is significant only to businesses.

Here’s a dandy. When I first connected to the Internet in 1993, and began programming for sockets and TCP/IP in 1994, I stumbled across some high consultant who said “the internet is going to pour acid all over every kind of business relationship that exists. The internet is going to burn it all away, burn it to cinders.” (I’m heavily paraphrasing, being too lazy to look up the original reference. But you get the idea.)

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