On Tuesday 30 October 2007 17:17:05 Earle Beason wrote:
however the actual reason is "Why not?,"
I ran RedHat for servers for years until they pulled the split - and screwed me and a lot of other people out of several months of paid support.
I didn't move to Fedora for several releases as it "found itself", and when I tried it I was not pleased. Their restructuring lost them a lot of community support, and the packages were disappointingly out of date. They stay that way too, what they release is what you get unless you do a version upgrade - which at last check did not work. Fedora is also more focused on the desktop; sensible text-based configuration and apps receive a lot less attention than they once did.
I've found a similar problem with Mandriva. While I love it on the desktop, recent releases have had non-starting problems with a number of packages that would only be run on a server, like dovecot, spamassassin, and others. Makes it nice if you get off on filing bug reports - with fixes, but makes it hard to get the server up and running on time.
Gentoo on a server - no. Must be updated constantly, and since the exodus to Ubuntu updates frequently break things. True, they're usually only broken for a day or so, but try explaining that to the boss who's waiting for an eMailed contract in Philadelphia when he can't get his mail.
I have the install disks to do Ubuntu LTS, but I keep chickening out. Don't want to loose a weekend to it right now.