With the deah of XP, the whole "why would you still be running X?" thing is a very popular attitude lately. I myself enjoy poking fun of my friend who works somewhere that just recently upgraded from MSIE 6 on XP to MSIE 7 on XP. I have another friend who works somewhere that decided the fix was to install Firefox on everyone's XP machines. (Oh the irony of being somewhere that didn't allow firefox for "security reasons" having to install Firefox for security reasons.)
The truth is that Linux is actually mature enough now that is is facing many of the same issues. The inevitable competing interests of a stable base to support on one hand and the need for the latest features or hardware support on the other are very real even for Linux.
Need to run proprietary software on Linux? The supported distro is often still RHEL5. If you are lucky its RHEL6, but that often does not include RHEL6.5. The same goes for hardware driver support. I use something regularly that only supports Debian, but the version it supports was already known as Old-Stable at the time of release and its now Old-Old-Stable. (And its only through luck that its not Debian Old-Old-Old-Stable like it was originally going to be) Not every commercial linux vendor falls into this habit, but enough do that its a very real problem. Often you have conflicting requirements from different vendors, or even for different applications from a single vendor.
Think this is limited to proprietary software... Which version of python are you running? If you answer python3, do you also have python2 installed as well? Thats what I thought :) (Inevitably the 5 people who have succesfully and fully migrated to python3 will reply just to prove me wrong, but those 5 are the rare exceptions.)
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With the deah of XP, the whole "why would you still be running X?" thing is a very popular attitude lately. I myself enjoy poking fun of my friend who works somewhere that just recently upgraded from MSIE 6 on XP to MSIE 7 on XP. I have another friend who works somewhere that decided the fix was to install Firefox on everyone's XP machines. (Oh the irony of being somewhere that didn't allow firefox for "security reasons" having to install Firefox for security reasons.)
The truth is that Linux is actually mature enough now that is is facing many of the same issues. The inevitable competing interests of a stable base to support on one hand and the need for the latest features or hardware support on the other are very real even for Linux.
Need to run proprietary software on Linux? The supported distro is often still RHEL5. If you are lucky its RHEL6, but that often does not include RHEL6.5. The same goes for hardware driver support. I use something regularly that only supports Debian, but the version it supports was already known as Old-Stable at the time of release and its now Old-Old-Stable. (And its only through luck that its not Debian Old-Old-Old-Stable like it was originally going to be) Not every commercial linux vendor falls into this habit, but enough do that its a very real problem. Often you have conflicting requirements from different vendors, or even for different applications from a single vendor.
Think this is limited to proprietary software... Which version of python are you running? If you answer python3, do you also have python2 installed as well? Thats what I thought :) (Inevitably the 5 people who have succesfully and fully migrated to python3 will reply just to prove me wrong, but those 5 are the rare exceptions.)
I was bitten recently when I found that CentOS 6.5+ actually still has Python 2.6 !!!! as the default python.
I thought I could get away with a few python2.7isms, but apparently not :-(
[root@vm-centos5 ~]# python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Jan 9 2013, 06:47:03)
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-54)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.