Thank you to everyone who replied.  I really like Ubuntu as a server and 
run Mint on my desktop.  I am trying to configure a server that will do 
Bind and Postfix+Dovecot+Spam Assassin.

I decided to go back to CentOS 7 because there is just too much to learn 
all at once.  I have been working with CentOS for 7 years and am 
comfortable with it.  I still have a lot to learn and thought I would 
learn one or two things at a time.  I got Bind to work and now I am 
working on the mail server.

I may switch over in a year or so.

Thanks for all the pointers and feedback!!




On 2014-12-24 11:08, Michael Butash wrote:
> On 12/24/2014 08:48 AM, Stephen Partington wrote:
> 
>> i like the Ubuntu release cycle a great deal. they have a long term
>> support release, and then incremental releases on a stability and
>> then feature swing each year. this to me is a great model.
> 
>  I fell in love with Ubuntu from the 6.04 to 10.04 days after learning
> to hate using RH in any linux environment I'd worked in, but after
> 10.04, it's pretty much just a lesser evil.  I like the release cycle
> for a server, as rarely do I need anything bleeding edge there.  As a
> desktop, it more or less sucks however.  More often than not, I find
> that in order to fix some terrible bug annoying me, I have to upgrade
> the distribution.  Not a big deal, but every release between 10.04 to
> 14.04 was a horrid process, almost always bricking my system in some
> new, creative way and ruining gconf profile data that caused weird gtk
> issues across the whole desktop even when I did get the system back. 
> 
> 
>> The parts i did not like about red hat, even as a server, i spent
>> more time compiling applications than anything else and fiddling
>> them all into place. while educational its REALLY nice to have
>> repositories that do this for you. and yes there are a number of
>> bundled repositories you can bolt on to redhat/centos, but they
>> never quire gave me the breadth of access i ever needed so i was
>> back to building applications i wanted to use. in the end what i
>> wanted to do was just easier with debian, then ubuntu came up with a
>> much more modern installer and that was where i really became
>> comfortable. easy to use, and able to recognize 95% of all the
>> hardware i have ever thrown at it. and to top it off some of the
>> easiest and complete chunks of documentation and support.
> 
>  To this day, I find RH and Cent to still be dysfunctional in this
> fashion, where anything in repos is so dated or horribly
> buggy/unusable that isn't common application, you end up compiling it
> yourself.  Then I get taken back to 1999 and get reminded of when I
> learned the term "dependency hell" that old solaris guys used to joke
> about RH being "immature", but this is still common.  Anything newer
> you might want to compile will require you update enough of the os
> you'll likely break old and new system components alike, ending up
> with some broken abortion of an os in the process.
> 
>  The equivalent in debian-ish builds is breaking apt trying to force
> in 3rd party packages out of necessity.  Luckily Ubuntu tends to keep
> somewhat modern that you don't end up having to rebuild the os to
> compile something, where I've generally had good luck doing that when
> needed, but finding compiled packages for new software is a crapshoot.
> 
>  Throw in a GPU for desktop use (or specialized network nics with
> vendor-provided blob drivers), and you create all sorts of new
> adventure trying to find a stable driver build that works with
> anything but a "stable" release on any distro.  So much time is spent
> working around xorg these days to make buggy software like compiz work
> (you know you *need* wobbly windows), ubuntu often outpaces the gpu
> vendors, especially amd to make a driver work in anything newly
> release should you *need* to upgrade distributions.
> 
>  It's about impossible to win these days with a general solution for
> everyone, both server and desktops.
> 
>> I guess what i am saying this is likely a similar path that allot of
>> people have taken, and this is giving ubuntu its real market share.
> 
>  I'd tried recently mint, fedora, and cent as an out from Ubuntu,
> finding all to be horribly buggier for my needs than Ubuntu.  I
> simply fell back into complacency, figuring out a way to live with
> ubuntu again with a clean build until the next release cycle breaks it
> again.  At least canonical didn't ruin their netinstall iso, yet.
> 
>  -mb
> 
> 
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-- 
Keith Smith
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