The same. Just a lot bigger.

yeah

"I'm not dead!"

Whenever we are dealing with a customer that isn't exactly sure what he/she wants, one of the salespeople would take a technician with him when first visiting the customer. That way all the really technical related questions get answered by the tech person, and if the salesperson is smart (cross your fingers) he'll pay attention so next time he'll be able to answer the question himself. Might take a few times before he manages this skill, and of course the tech person will have to invest some time, but in the end it really pays off. The salesperson will (hopefully) sell the product and the technical people can start right away without having to ask a lot of questions afterwards, or swearing at sales for selling something that they can't deliver.

How about, "I want something like Fedora, but which does not require a yearly upgrade that will inevitably break things?" Now, where might I find such a disto, without having to pay for it...

You're not required to update, but for the sake of security/productivity it is advisible. However, there's one thing that doesn't work with RHEL/CentOS/SL and that's the major upgrade, like the one from 5 to 6. You just can't. You're required to reinstall the base from scratch. Something that Fedora (or Ubuntu, for that matter) can do. I've updated from F10 to F16 without things breaking.

I use RHEL/CentOS/SL too though, but only for servers. Usually the lifetime of a major update cycle equals (or is bigger than) the lifetime of the hardware.

May we burn her?

I could moderate you down, but that wouldn't be fair. Instead I'll just comment and say I disagree with you. As a person who has been using Linux on his desktop for over 7 years now, I'm more familiar with that than the gazillion flavors of Windows (7) nowadays. At least I know that everybody agrees that Vista is terrible, but I wouldn't know the difference between Starter, Premium, Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate. In my opinion that's based on nil experience with any of these flavors, I think that's more confusing to people than a Linux distro flavor. I always say to new Linux users "give Ubuntu a try" and to the techies who want to experiment with brand-new software I tell them to try Fedora.

And what you call disagreement among users/developers, I call variety. Don't like Ubuntu? Fine, give Fedora a try, or OpenSUSE or Debian. It's all good, it's all free and you (listen carefully now) can decide without spending money. I know really experienced Linux users who are so accustomed to using Debian, they can customize the entire system to look exactly the way they want to. Same goes for Ubuntu people and Fedora users. Don't stick with one distribution, try a lot of them, until you find one that you like. And even then, you aren't forced to stick with it. And even if you pick one that I can't 'support', I can tell you where you can go find help. Lots of fora and IRC chans filled with experienced people who can (and most often will) help you out.

Linux _is_ simple to use. Depending on the distro and your personal preferences. I can make myself comfortable with Fedora and its gnome shell, but I'll probably have a slightly more difficult time trying to get used to Ubuntu's Unity. But that's just me. I'm glad other distributions exist that offer different things. Freedom to use any (or none) of them. Gotta love it.

Yeah, I get what you mean. And the only reason why I haven't switched over to Chrome is because I kind of like vimperator, which doesn't exist for Chrome. Or at least, not in the way vimperator for Firefox operates.

READY. ...

Yeah, good memories. Thanks, Jack.

So they 'hacked' a DNS service and then claim to have defaced hundreds, if not thousands of websites. Big deal. Come back when you effectively disabled the Great Firewall.

Those extensions now get a whole new function!

You should've updated your system, check logfiles, run chkrootkit on a regular basis etc. Else, you're no better than people running unpatched Windows desktops.

Glad you got it ;)

Exactly!

Mine is encrypted though with 'acomplicatedpassword' which is very easy to type so I never get the odd looks I get whenever someone asks me for the passphrase.

Whoops. Wasn't your comment.