Steven Haigh,

----- Original Message -----
> My thoughts are more moving towards using a continually rolling distro like Arch Linux.
 [...]
> EL5 & 6 really came around at a time where there was a lot more instability in the linux 
> environment - and these days, unless you have a strict auditing requirement, there isn't 
> really much tying anyone to EL.
> 
> Thoughts?

Yeah.  My thoughts are that EL and Arch are two completely different things.  People use EL because they want a slow moving, long supported, stable platform.  The only problem with that is that it starts to get long-in-the-tooth after a few years... especially with regards to kernels, development and web stacks, and desktop software... for people who care about those things.

Obviously Fedora and Arch are very different from RHEL.  I group those two together because they are two of the most bleeding edge distros.  I personally like Fedora for my desktops and EL for servers.

The thing with using EL is that third-parties target it because it is a known quantity and reproducible.  Each Arch box is basically a snowflake (none of them the same) and because it is a rolling platform, it is a target that is constantly moving... so third-party stuff (for some value of third-party stuff... like Zimbra as one tiny example) will almost never target it because it doesn't know which version of Arch to build for.

I say that with no disrespect to Arch nor the wonderful job the Arch community does putting together the distro and everything that circles around it... but clearly Arch and RHEL/EL are NOT targeted at the same use cases.  While there might be some overlap, for most users, not so much.

I also encourage you to use Arch if you want to... and if it works for you... but I don't think there is going to be much  movement of users between Arch and EL and vice versa.

There is a ton of stuff to get excited about in the upcoming RHEL7 and a lot of people have been chomping at the bit for newer stuff in RHEL and are indeed excited.  No one is going to twist your arm and make you be excited though.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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