[GTALUG] XFCE on regular Red Hat

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com>

| For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to build a
| new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a supported version
| to host recent tools on.
| 
| Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the bleeding
| edge in kernel versions,

I hadn't noticed that.  Can you give an example of a package that
mattered to you?

I was under the (untested) impression that Fedora updates applications
more frequently than Ubuntu.  But maybe that's because, where I use
Ubuntu, I usually use LTS.

RHEL really does keep applications stable to a fault.  That's what
their mandate is.  They've recently softened this with a new scheme
that lets you choose to bolt on blessed updated subsystems ("software
collections").  These are not replacements but additions.

Keeping packages current, if it is done right, is a lot of labour.
Doing it wrong causes grief for the user.  I imagine only the
well-resourced distros can do it themselves for a broad range of
packages.  Debian does it for many downstream distros.

Stability vs quick adoption of change is a tradeoff.  In my (limited)
world, I put these as useful points on a spectrum:

RHEL 6, RHEL 7, Ubuntu LTS 12.04, Ubuntu LTS 14.04, Ubuntu, Fedora

I don't really have a feel for where to place the various Debian
streams.

I never end up using XFCE so I cannot address that.