It's time to update my view of Ubuntu with my mostrecent set of feelings. Well, with why I feel my most recent setof feelings, which is that Ubuntu LTS is significantly inferiorto Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Ubuntu's LTS releases (Ubuntu 6.06 and Ubuntu 8.04) promise five yearsof support (hence the 'Long Term Support' label). This support is whywe're able to consider them, since we need more than 18 months of

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or equivalently CentOS) has any number ofthings going for it from the perspective of sysadmins, but one ofthings it does not have is user visibility. Ubuntu is the hot Linuxdistribution these days, despite its issues , withspecial acclaim for its desktop experience.

This user visibility matters, contrary to what some people believe(or would like to be the case).

A good part of why we run Ubuntu on ourcore servers is that research groups were already running Ubuntu ontheir machines

I gave several sensible low-level reasons why Unix shells should beprogrammable in WhyShellLanguages . But the higher level reason whyis simpler: shells should be programmable because it helps peoplegrow their expertise.

If doing sophisticated Unix glue things is donewith a separate language, there is a huge barrier to entry; you haveto learn an entirely new language before you can start doing evenrelatively small things. Many ordinary users are simply not goingto have either the interest or the time to invest (especially whenit may not