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Red Hat to Enter the Desktop Market
head_dunce writes "It looks like Red Hat is going to release their Global Desktop Linux in September and give Ubuntu a challenge for the Linux desktop market. Red Hat Global Desktop 'would be sold with a one-year subscription to security updates.'" It looks like another choice for the proverbial Aunt Tillie. The release is being delayed in order to provide greater media compatibility, "to permit users to view a wide range of video formats on their computers."
Not to mention that RPM is horribly broken, and has been such for years.
.deb/APT package management system), they would probably be just fine. But RPM is broken in the same large way as it was in 1996 when I first tried it: It doesn't handle complex setups very well at all.
To be sure, there are some pretty ugly hacks that are out there (yum, etc) that try (and largely fail) to address the problems of the RPM package format. Now, if RH would either reinvent the wheel (why?) or use an already stable package management solution (e.g., the
Case in point: I went to work on someone's computer a couple of months ago, and what they were running into was a problem updating. So I tried to update their system for them (they were disabled and not able to read the screen). After 90 minutes of attempting to update, it finally bombed out on a failure to resolve a dependency for GNU coreutils. Which is part of the core distribution. Everything was configured correctly, but it couldn't resolve a simplistic dependency.
I moved them to Ubuntu, and they've been happy ever since. I was honestly hoping that RPM would have been fixed by now... I like the fact that there is choice in distributions, because each distribution targets a different audience. But it seems that the RPM-based distributions seem to target "people who like stress in their lives." Or is it that RH and its spin-offs want to ensure that IT people can keep their jobs by still having the occasional thing that breaks?