[ Thanks to David
Spector for this link. ]
“One of the things I used look forward to about twice a year was
a new release of Red Hat (RH) Linux. I’m pretty conservative on my
main desktop system, where I write my articles and do my main
development, and tend to run a pretty out-of-the-box configuration.
I leave my hotrodding for my experimental system, where it doesn’t
matter if I accidentally trash a disk. Up until recently (say, Red
Hat 7.2), upgrading my system wasn’t a major hassle, because the
overall rate of change of packages was relatively small and the
improvements in system performance, as well as the look and feel of
the user interface/experience, got to be more fun with each new
release.“The release of the 2.4 series kernel made a lot more
functionality available to developers, and the Linux community has
taken advantage of it with wild abandon. With the release of Red
Hat 7.3 (and SuSE 8.0, and most other Linux distributions from
about mid-2001), I noticed a sudden bump in the number of
applications available and a radical change in the dependencies in
any given distribution, release after release.“For many users, upgrading a system or two is not a major
hassle; they put in the CD-ROMs and go. However, the picture gets a
bit more interesting if you’re an enterprise using Linux for
development or, dare I say it, as the corporate desktop standard
for your users…”