[K12OSN] New thin client recommendations

[Jeff Siddall]

On 05/09/2011 11:40 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 5/9/2011 9:58 AM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
>>
>>>>> I am currently using Edubuntu 9.10 and will move to either CentOS 6
>>>>> with LTSP 5.2 or Edubuntu latest version over the summer, depending on
>>>>> what is available.
>>>>
>>>> Hmmm... Not sure about edubuntu but I always found Ubuntu's kernels
>>>> were
>>>> awfully old -- really that is the main reason I went to Fedora in the
>>>> first place!
>>>
>>> I've always looked at kernels as standardized interfaces to hardware and
>>> don't see much reason to change until the hardware is replace with
>>> something unsupported (other than bug fixes which are more likely to be
>>> done correctly for old versions than new ones that will bring new bugs).
>>>   What new kernel features can't you live without?
>>
>> Exactly: "..the hardware is replace with something unsupported..."
>>
>> Ubuntu didn't have the drivers for my hardware whereas Fedora did.
>> Simple as that.
>>
>> In this case the issue was xorg drivers, but I have also had issues with
>> video capture/decoded cards, LAN cards, wireless cards, touchscreens etc.
> 
> I gave up the 'install new versions every week' game that fedora plays
> long ago, but back when I tried to keep up (and before their
> ever-changing kernel simply wouldn't boot after a mid-version update on
> the fairly mainstream IBM box I used for testing), I had the impression
> that ubuntu and fedora regularly leapfrogged each other so that which
> you considered newer or having better hardware support would depend on
> which one had just done the most recent release (or just fixed the bug
> that affected your specific hardware in the earlier versions they were
> shipping...).

Well, Fedora is certainly a bleeding edge disto with a strong emphasis
on the _bleeding_ part :)  Things got a lot better for me when I
switched to automatically installing only security updates.

Anyway, Fedora upgrades kernels throughout the distro's support life
whereas Ubuntu does not (well, last I checked which was admittedly quite
a while ago).  So if both Fedora and Ubuntu released a new distro today
they might be pretty close, but over the next year Ubuntu would be
further and further out of date.

I think this may be a bigger issue when an LTS is being released (ie:
all the even versions) which coincidentally was when I gave up using
Ubuntu.  LTS releases seem to use older kernels whereas odd releases
seem to use a recent kernel.