var wrote:Businesses don't use RHEL because it's better. They use it because it is a company who provides this service and 'PROFESSIONAL' support at every level for every paying business.
Presumably in much the same way that large business(/governmental/et cetera) entities - who have LARGE budgets - can set up paid support with Microsoft?
var wrote:For Mint to even be considered there would have to be a corporate entity providing worldwide professional support with engineers, telops etc. Simply put, a business won't use a distro that is supported by volunteers on a forum, no way.
That could be somewhat debatable, depending on the scenario. If I'm asked to do payroll and simple "accounts receivable/payable" tasks, along with some business-related correspondence and possibly even a presentation - or brochure - or two, and I was able to find apps that did all of that in linux, I'd probably do so if there were "stable" versions available. If I was a guy named Bob who owned "Bob's Computer Sales & Service - Linux OS and Training (All Aspects) Our Specialty," lol, probably even more likely. If I owned a small or medium-sized business, say under 50 employees, less than 20 computers, and had a top shelf "IT computer guy," then I suppose I wouldn't give a whit to what OS/apps my computers ran as long as I trusted the computer person (or department?) to be able to ensure that everything was secure and stable. If I were the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation? Well, gee, that would be even more "idle speculation" than the other scenarios
. But it'd be nice to have an entire department of paid linux developers/maintainers, who have what ended up being a custom distro. But that's probably not how it works in reality - they'd probably much rather spend $250,000/year on outside support than pay five people $50,000/year each to do the same thing.
Although... If you control the hardware and, to a large extent, the software (develop as much as possible in-house, specify what else gets used), I suppose that crew of developers would have an easier time of things than, say, the Mint developers who have to provide an OS that "just works" on so many different combinations of hardware running who knows how many thousands of different apps. IDK.
IIRC, the person that is (was?) behind SolydX / SolydK used to also produce some kind of "business edition." I think it might have been called Backoffice, but I'm not sure. Seems like I read a post by him somewhere in which he stated that he was spending too much time on that kind of stuff (or too much time ignoring his family, lol, IDK) and so he dropped the business edition. Or maybe he just ended up discovering that it's tough to get businesses to PAY for free(?) software and support if you're not world - or at least nationally - known and don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on advertising each year, IDK. But, yeah, someone did produce a business-related distro for a while... and now they don't. So I seriously doubt that it's any kind of priority whatsoever with Clem (who already produces several different versions of Mint, built on two different "bases" (Ubuntu and Debian)).
When I first installed Mint, I spent (a few) hours looking through what was available via Synaptic Package Manager. There were "a few" business-related things. I'm sure that there are more, if one cares to search the Internet. Therefore, it could be said that anyone who wishes to spend the time finding and learning the specific software that their business needs (along with learning enough about linux in general to be able to troubleshoot if/when they pooch their system) can set up their own "business computer running linux." It'd probably be much cheaper than purchasing Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop (et al), et cetera...
...Until you figured how much your labor was worth, anyway
.
Regards,
MDM