I’ve lived long enough to know my own answer to most questions. I can afford to ignore progress in some areas because some things will never get any better — not really.
Over the past year I’ve tested a wide range of operating systems on my home-built machine. That includes Windows XP, Vista and 7; openSUSE 11. and 11.3; Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid (and the Trinity KDE packages on both); CentOS 5 and RHEL 6 Beta. I’ve also played with a few more on a Dell laptop which is now gone, to include Debian Etch, Lenny and Squeeze; QNX 6, Syllable, NetBSD, and some others. But I feel comfortable saying on my main desktop RHEL 6.0 Beta 2 indicates the gold release is likely to stick for a long time. It appeals to my curmudgeon instincts.
I am not a technician in the sense I know how to run scads of tests. I’m just a retiree who has played with computers since the days of DOS 5 and Red Hat 5 (the old series before Enterprise Linux). I pretend I’m a technician when I operate my computer help ministry. For most of my clients, I recommend Ubuntu Lucid because they hate rolling release, but love easy-to-use. For myself, RHEL 6 is much better. As a user experience, this is the fast OS I’ve ever run on this hardware. All other things being comparable, this thing has never been so responsive. It even compiles faster. I don’t pretend to know what optimizations have been done by the developers, but it works for me.
Because it is pretty much the same API as Fedora Core 13, I can chase down source RPMs and compile almost anything which doesn’t already wait in the official repositories. There are a few things which are better outside the RPM system, because they tend to have critical updates more frequently than the packagers can keep up. For example, I greatly prefer Firefox built directly from source. I know just enough to tweak it at the same time to get it just as I want. I also like Elinks for some uses, and it works best simply built from source.
I like Lynx and other Xterm applications, such as MC and Vim. I’m slowly drifting away from using Joe as much, simply because it gets harder and harder to match what I’m learning to do with Vim, and I’m into things I can’t understand how to tweak on Joe. It’s actually easier to learn Vim’s esoteric keystrokes. I especially like using Vim with Alpine.
A few months back I explained how I learned to setup Alpine for multiple accounts and all about drop boxes, but the page to which I linked disappeared. The whole domain is gone. I didn’t remember the complex instructions, so I came up with a quick-n-dirty HOWTO for hacking the configuration file directly. I wrote it up as a plain text file to encourage others to simply save it for future reference. It’s public domain, so steal it and do what you like.
But it’s not all dreary console stuff. I also built Mplayer and all the supporting SRPMs from scattered sources, more or less matching Fedora 13. So far, it has played everything I throw at it. I also made sure to build ffmpeg. I don’t bother with piracy to make money, but when I need something which is available in a proprietary format, I don’t hesitate to rip it apart or change it to suit my tastes. I’ve already stated clearly I feel utterly certain my God condemns most copyright laws. Not so much in principle, but in the way it tends to get applied by idiots who don’t understand the necessity of electronic data being utterly free and unencumbered. They are the immoral ones (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), shaking down the artists and their fans, and offering nothing of value in return. The whole idea of copyright has long been perverted and abused.
And if I really wanted to run something from Microsoft, I might pay if it’s feasible, but I see nothing immoral about running a hacked and cracked ISO. You’d be wise to make sure it was clean, but the very design of the OS itself prevents any real hope of security and privacy. The whole point everyone wants to ignore in the argument about free information, particularly in electronic formats, is it applies both ways. I don’t expect to have any real security against whatever lies on the other side of my cable modem. My own privacy is gone once any item gets recorded as information on my computer. I don’t pretend it will be sacrosanct, because the whole thing is merely a matter of voluntary honor and personal ethics. I can’t decide for someone else what they really ought to do about my information, my Internet profile, etc. And they can’t decide for me, either. All those laws about it simply reflect the common assumptions, which are then twisted through the criminal process we call “legislation” and forced upon the world by a vast army of mostly incompetent boobs on folks who are even more incompetent.
It’s not a question of might (or ability) makes right, but since too few people in this world grasp my morality, and the underlying theology, there is little point in arguing what it means to be moral regarding digital rights. I’m quite the radical and make no bones about it. If you know your way around this stuff, you get to take advantage of how ever much you know, and I won’t pontificate about digital rights.
I know just enough about such matters to decide I really do prefer RHEL over all other Linux distros, and Linux over other operating systems — for now. I’m not an OS zealot, and if Cupertino or Redmond actually meet my needs in some future day, and it’s closer to my wishes than the alternatives, I’ll switch. (But it’s unlikely.) Curmudgeon I may be, but threats and needs do change. RHEL 6 is pretty secure as Linux goes, while still offering a very high usability quotient, particularly for those inclined to learn DIY. I can get almost anything I actually use this way. Once the CentOS team turns out their version of this, I’ll be writing a migration guide for those equally so inclined who want something vastly superior to Windows whatever.
I find RHEL 6 a major turning point in the technology game.
I look forward to reading your migration guide.