Amahi Forums

I'm tossing this out for opinions from everyone, and hopefully consideration by the development team. In the past, we tried an Ubuntu-based version of Amahi (on the 12.04 LTS). I'm suggesting that we drop the Fedora based version, or at least make the Ubuntu one a default moving on.

The reason that I'm proposing this is simple: Amahi development isn't on the same release schedule as Fedora (or Ubuntu), which means that people who are running the latest version lose support for the underlying OS at some point. Fedora only supports their version for 25 to 26 months (1 month past the next "official" release), where Ubuntu supports their LTS for five years.

Unless the development team is going to get enough help to create new versions (or update the current version to the latest release of the OS), it makes more sense to stick with an Operating System that will provide us with updates for a longer period of time.

So my proposal is that the team try to migrate Amahi 7 to Ubuntu 12.04 (or even 14.04), and then start developing Amahi 8 for Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04.

Thank you for considering this.
Patrick.

Hi Patrick,

We will be releasing Amahi 8 on Fedora 21. See the Amahi 8 alpha release page.

We could go on for a long time about this. We tried Ubuntu in Amahi 6 and the experiment did not work out for many reasons. We thought the grass would be greener, but that was not the case. Similar issues with the repos, etc. Worse installer, similar hardware support, but ultimately, Fedora is a more professional release and now with their Server releases, we may even be able to switch to Centos in the future for really long-term support.

Ultimately, it comes down to the development team (which I head). We lost our Ubuntu lead (Frans) shortly after the release and that put a huge burden on the rest of the team, like porting apps, etc. etc. At this time, Frans has become more acquainted with Fedora and their much much better ARM/embedded support, which is also a major consideration.

We are not totally closed to it, though. Do you feel that you can help with an Ubuntu release?
If so, the platform has most things there and the installer could be updated easily.

The harder parts are the apps, though we have developed an automation framework that would make it easier to keep them up.

Definitely let's talk if you are interested in jumping in and leading this effort!

In my opinion, basing a server on an OS that's only supported for 24 months is short sighted. That's a more rapid release cycle than even Microsoft uses!

Please, please, change over to Ubuntu.

Agreed, Fedora has a better installer - but why does that matter so much? The installer is used ONCE.

There are many practical reasons. But first: we want to start releasing faster and not be permanently behind.

The other thing to keep in mind is this: the systems will keep on running, for years and years if left going. And they are behind firewalls, not out in the open internet. They are built for reliability and will last well past any OS updates have stopped. If nothing else, non-security-related OS updates, present sources of potential instability.

We also tried it, .. we thought the grass would be greener, but in fact, it was not. http://www.amahi.org/faq/does-amahi-support-ubuntu

It was all a mirage, led by the enthusiasm of the community. In the end there were quite a few more issues.

• Repo issues were similar (they vanish, introduce issues with caching, etc. This is subtle, hard to explain and hard to manage at scale.
• We could not easily patch upstream, it was impossible to get the attention of anyone in the Ubuntu community, whereas in the Fedora (and CentOS) communities, they were open to receiving patches and we had multiple times where we contributed releases to packages that we had patched for our community, sometimes in record times.
• At some point we volunteered to maintain some packages that were edgier and we had expertise with and we did for a long time (passenger).
• The Ubuntu community have little interest in the Linux community at large, whereas the Fedora/CentOS community have more of a leadership position.
• Ubuntu has much less (if at all) mature (and degree of commitment) to ARM, which is something we're interested in for migrating to more power efficient hardware platforms
• The RPM system is, in the end, more mature and better documented than the APT system. More professional and better documented wins. We thought APT packages would be more polished, but in fact were harder to maintain.
• Our Ubuntu developer realized all these things and how hard it is to do in that community. He had a change in life situation and had to slow down. Later when he came back, he realized Fedora (and maybe one day CentOS) worked better for Amahi.

Does that answer your questions/concerns?

I don't know if it was just me, but Ruby would often crash on Ubuntu, I was forever re-booting my server. Googling the problem showed long term issues with getting Ubuntu to play nice with Ruby. I'm happy to stay with Fedora. And being headless, it doesn't really matter what OS (from a user point of view) is supporting Amahi..........