Thats the thing i like about CentOS/EL... It is very stable and reliable. Also it is quite boring and does not ship with for example wine or azureus. However Neither does XP which is still quite popular... naturally we want to avoid a situation where we do not have centralized package management... but that does not mean that everything has to be distro-based. Take rpmfusion and atrpms for example. They both are multi-distro and multi-version. Perhaps some of the packages in Ubuntu should not belong to Ubuntu but in a repository that is shared between debian-based distributions. Possibly a build system could be used to make a common repository with both yum and apt repositories and QA teams for the mayor distributions. This would allow the distributions to focus more on distribution-specific task and less on building firefox and azureus.... As far as I am concerned 12.04 ks far to edgy and unpolished. 10.04 will be my choice for Ubuntu LTS edition until (and if) 12.04 matures. For servers I will stick to CentOS/EL because of the unbeatable support cycle, I can only get better support cycles if turning to Solaris or other non-FOSS software. I think that for most users Linux are only suitable for the server side. They need reliable tools and not edgy and buggy things with the highest possible version number. Ubuntu 12.04 has not even passed alpha (appliance test) yet in my world, and 10.04 has to much outdated software. This is also true for the Red Hat camp... Fedora is to unstable and CentOS is to stable and conservative for desktops. A repository that brings loads of fresh apps in the desktop category like firefox azureus and pidgin to conservative dists like 10.04 would and CentOS would be what these users need. Some of us wanna play with the latest kernel, btrfs and KVM features that makes Fedora/latest Ubuntu the best choice, but "Duncan Defaultuser" would want something right between a stable LTS/CentOS and our edgy dists... and no such option do exist unless they build packages themselves or install software in highly unrecommended ways. The closest thing we have is CentOS + Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) which is Fedora packages ported to CentOS/EL that is not supported by Red Het. However EPEL is seriously outdated and under staffed. This may have something to do with the part where it only supports CentOS/EL... I started working on a wider repository but got stuck on porting Fedoras azureus to CentOS because it depends on maven3 which have circular dependencies and my knowledge of packaging was not enough to solve that... I gave up after about a week... In truth maven3 packaging belong to the jpackage project, but they seem to be as understaffed as the EPEL project. I did however have some minor Fedora Raẃhide packages building on Fedora 15 and 16 plus CentOS 5 and 6 on the SUSE build farm from common source packages. SUSE do not support debian distributions so I never tried compiling for those. > Date: Sun, 20 May 2012 09:30:29 +0000 > From: