Distribution upgrade

[Chris Miller]

On Nov 15, 2007 2:54 PM, Stew Schneider <stew.schneider at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was following Dvorak's latest pronouncement of the "deathwatch" for
> Vista on /. The majority of the comments (as anyone who has tried to
> work with VISTA will confirm) were negative, but one kept coming up --
> there is no compelling reason to upgrade because VISTA doesn't offer
> anything valuable over XP.
>
> So, here I am with the servers I run for non-profits running Dapper and
> my home machine running Feisty, and I pose the question: What does Gutsy
> offer over Feisty that would motivate me to undertake an upgrade, given
> that anytime you move the table you risk making some of the chess men
> fall down?

OpenOffice 2.3 supports MS Office 2007 files IIRC, but I haven't
tested it yet.  I didn't keep a sample .docx file from when I beta
tested it, and I'm not going to buy it just so I can see if OpenOffice
works with it (that's crazy!  paying the Microsoft tax just to see if
your tax evasion software works with the tax?)

I also think it has better versions of Firefox, and Flash as well.

Overall?  Probably not much.  However, the nice thing about Linux is
that you don't *have* to upgrade if you don't feel like it.  Windows
Update will just hound you until you either switch to Linux or
upgrade.  OS X has the best updater, I think.  It's really simple,
doesn't bug you that much, and it's generally really quick and
painless about the updates as well.  Of course, it doesn't handle
package management, where Linux's decidedly BSD-style management wins
outright as far as making software available to everyone goes.

I know, Windows Marketplace is pretty nifty, I've been there a few
times just to browse and see what's there, but overall Digital Locker
isn't anywhere near as useful as apt-get.  Digital Locker doesn't deal
with software updates, but Windows Update doesn't deal with
third-party applications (thank God, I don't think I'd want MS mucking
with them anyways!).  Apple Update doesn't touch non-Apple software,
even though they probably have the savvy to pull if off in the right
way.

So Linux/UNIX/etc. stands in a class by it/them -selves.

If it's being too annoying about upgrading, you could try to uninstall
Adept/Synaptic...  Aptitude is superior to them in almost every way,
at least in every way that I find valuable.  Others have different
thoughts about what makes a piece of software good and what makes it
bad.

Just a little food for thought (sorry, I just finished a blog post and
am still in the analytical thinking mode).  Hopefully that's what you
were wanting to discuss :)

-- 
Registered Linux Addict #431495
http://profile.xfire.com/mrstalinman
John 3:16!