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Using the last guys logic (whom you replied to), no one should use OpenSuSE or Fedora because they're buggy riddled POS. Fedora is Red Hats community based distribution for their enterprise release, and OpenSuSE is the basis for Novells Desktop product (SLED SP1 for instance is based on OpenSuSE 10.1 plus patches).

Well, I don't think I'd have read quite such an extream view from his statement. However, yes it could have been cleaner.

I believe he was just saying SuSE was more stable than Fedora (I'm not sure if he was specifically refering to Open Suse, or the pay for distro).

If OpenSuse is to SLED, as CentOS is to RedHat EL, then yes, OpenSuse would be geared more towards a "static production environment", however if it is the same as Fedora, then I would say neither are applicable for a produciton environment (I'll clarify lower down what I mean by production).

Also, 'It is not recommended for production use' - who doesn't recommend it? some nameless person with a blog located at some place in the middle of no where? how do you define production? someone who needs 24/7 uptime and support, or merely someone who wants a distro for his or her desktop use?

Well, I suppose the first thing to clarify is the statement "production use" and what that actually means, as it is bandied about a lot, with out a defenition.

I've been working as a systems administrator for about 10 years now, in various companies. In that time "production use/ environment" has primarily come to mean long support cycles.

I want to be able to install a server, and know that once it is working, I can forget about it's upgrade cycle for a significant amount of time, but be confident that security erata is available.

Fedora, does not, has not, and will not provide this, and I don't want them to.

In addition to this, Fedora has released things that HAVE caused problems, migration to the 2.6 kernel was far from smooth, introduction of SElinux was atrocious (now, it's just fan dabby dosey), I don't want to have things like this thrown on to a "production system".

Kernel upgrades within releases for fedora have broken things quite spectacularly.

I think it boils down to the fact that "production environment" tends not to mean "dynamic", dynamic bad, static gooood.

However, for me on my desktop, at work and at home, fedora has proved to be excellent, desktop and laptop. So from that perspective it's absalutely fine.

Why do people equate 'community based distributions' as nothing more than 'experimental versions'? sure, these companies make up the majority of contributors. If people choose not to muck in and actually contribute, who sit outside these establishment, then why blame Red Hat or Novell? All these companies offer is a distribution based on the community version with long term support both software, telephone and consultancy. What the heck is wrong with that?

Erm, I think your going over board here, the discussion was Fedora and OpenSuSE, at no point in time have we mentioned "community based distrobutions", remember there are many other community based distro's out that other than fedora/ opensuse. Critasism's aimed at them has nothing to do with slackware for example.