One might perhaps accuse me of getting overly worked up about badsecurity patches . Is it really such a bigdeal if a security patch has a flaw?

My answer is yes, because there are a number of bad consequences whensecurity patches are untrustworthy:

• it discourages people from installing them. As we've seen repeatedly,having more insecure systems around endangers everyone, whetherit is on the Internet or behind your firewall.

• a broken but 'secure' machine is not really an improvement over afunctional but insecure machine

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