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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
> You are saying in effect, that the 'Distro' is
> the root of all support for all package
> availalble through it's repo.
Nobody's said that the distro is the *root* - but they are certainly the first step, and nowhere have you mentioned going through your distro's support at all - you're just skipping straight to the vendor as though there were noplace else to go.
Also, I've been patiently trying to point out that you generally *can* get very current indeed, by the developer's standards, without having to leave your distro's repos entirely - or (in the case of Ubuntu and its PPA and Postgre specifically) at the very least without having to leave ALL semblance of a shared, standard codebase.
It's actually MORE difficult to support a user (and in this case, developers count as "users") who's gone off-reservation and built from source, because then you get to wonder WTF they did in terms of compile-time options, possible weird versions of dependencies, etc etc etc - whereas if you know your user has installed a binary package from somewhere standard, you already *know* the answer to all those questions and can proceed to more interesting things immediately.
So, what I'm saying is "doing it right" is:
* install from repos
* if you have a problem, go through your distro's support first
* if your distro's support can't help you, THEN go to the vendor
* check backports and well-known PPAs for packages new enough to satisfy the vendor, if the vendor requires an upgrade
Sidebar, Stuart - how well does nouveau work with multiple-monitors? VDPAU? The notorious vsync issue (again, I think this is usually only an issue with multiple monitors)?
Any experience?