[mythtv-users] Why Free Software has poor usability ?

Kevin Kuphal kkuphal at gmail.com
Tue Aug 5 21:48:24 UTC 2008


On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 4:37 PM, JEDIDIAH <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 01:45:49PM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
> > Mark Knecht wrote:
> > > We've been using Linux for about 8 years at home. It's still
> > > frustrating, mostly in the distro space. Kids making decisions about
> > > packages that effect 10,000 people without considering all the issues.
> > > Nothing we can do as users except deal with the problems they create.
> >
> > The great thing about distros is there are so many of them.  If you
> > don't like the way the one you're using is managed, you can switch.
> >
> > If you want a "mature" distribution that doesn't push out unnecessary
> > changes, I'd suggest one of the Red Hat derivatives.  Scientific Linux
> > and CentOS both track Red Het 5, which is a distribution aimed at
> > businesses that want stability and long service lives between upgrades.
> >   If I were starting over that's probably what I'd use.
>
> You don't really need a "stable" sort of distribution so much. You
> just need to treat the system as a business would. IOW, you aren't
> going to push out any gratiutious changes. You are going to test
> things first. Perhaps you will let others be guinea pigs for you.
>
> Unix in general "stays working" once you've gotten it that way.
>
> That's one of it's key strong points. It doesn't matter so much
> what the distro maintainers do since your mythboxes should be
> well insulated from that anyways.


To a point.  I subscribe to that philosophy of never updating the box until
necessary (and this would result in a stable OS whether Linux or Windows in
this case) but the problem I have run into with Linux distributions other
than CentOS is that the third-party repositories used drop support for
Fedora and the like so fast that upgrading a MythTV major version will often
then require an OS upgrade as well because there are no longer packages for
updated items like QT, etc.

Kevin
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