Why are so many people using 4.x?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 01:30:51PM -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 01:19:30PM -0500, DAve wrote:
> > Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > >On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 05:11:05PM -0500, DAve wrote:
> > >
> > >>>Really you want to use 6.0 or 6.1 on any new system, simply because
> > >>>that's the modern, supported version of FreeBSD.
> > >>>
> > >>>Kris
> > >>I get frightened when something is no longer "modern" when it is less 
> > >>than a year old. http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/announce.html
> > >>Good reasons to recommend 6.X would be "bug FOO is fixed", "hardware FOO 
> > >>is now fully supported", "FOO is now a kernel module and can be unloaded 
> > >>or loaded at will", "disk performance is gazillion% better", etc.
> > >
> > >If it makes you happy, all of those things are also true.
> > >
> > >Kris
> > 
> > It would be nice to actually tell new users why 6.X is better wouldn't 
> > you think?
> 
> No, because I have better things to do with my time than to repeat
> information that is widely available and locatable with a few seconds
> of searching.

Anyway, I think you kind of misconstrued my emails.  The original
question was "what version of FreeBSD should a new user run", and it
was suggested that a new user runs 4.11.

The important questions for new users are not "what new technical
features does 6.x have that I probably won't understand nor care about
anyway", but:

* Is it a good release?

* Who can I ask when I need help?

Clearly, 4.11 is a very good release (the 6.x series are also very
good releases; the 5.x series not so good in comparison).  However,
4.11 fails on the second point, because 4.11 is in practise no longer
completely supported; this is my point.

For example, what if you want to run GNOME, and encounter a problem?
You'll be told by the GNOME team that running GNOME on 4.11 is no
longer supported (in fact you may not even be able to compile it).
Ditto KDE.  What if you run into a FreeBSD bug?  You'll be told that
4.11 is no longer supported and to try 6.1 since it's probably fixed
already anyway.  What if you want to write some PERL code?  The
version in 4.x is very old and will no longer work with many current
PERL modules, so you'll have to work out how to replace it.  Ditto the
C compiler.  etc.

So why is 4.11 is no longer fully supported?  Because the resources of
the FreeBSD community are finite, and it's our opinion that it's more
productive to devote our limited resources to the FreeBSD branches
that are actively being developed.  Yes, 4.11 was only released 14
months ago - but it's the final release of a branch that is *over 7
years old* and carrying over 7 years worth of legacy baggage, and
that's really the key point here.

In about 9 months the FreeBSD 4.x branch will be desupported entirely,
so things are only going to get worse for any remaining 4.x users who
need help to run their system.

So when 4.11 is ruled out for your new installation, applying the same
reasoning tells you that it's smart to install the current "stable"
release, which is currently 6.0 and soon to be 6.1.  You wouldn't pick
some random older release like 5.4 unless you have good reason to, in
which case you don't need to ask.

Kris
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