> On 7 Jan 2019, at 12:16, MAH Maccallum <m.a.h.maccal...@qmul.ac.uk> wrote: > > For example I cannot currently use Dropbox under SL > although I have manually re-partitioned and re-formatted > to use ext4 rather than xfs, since Dropbox insists on ext4. > The error message tells me I do not have glibc 2.19, and > advises I should update to Ubuntu 14.04+ or Fedora 21+
I would say that DropBox and other software vendors are at fault. They are putting their developer convenience above that of their users. Having said that the desktop Linux market is so small that it does not make commercial sense to do otherwise. The whole point of SL/Centos is that it is stable and doesn't change. This has the side-effect of making the later point releases quite out of date. I believe RHEL8 is in beta so this will reset the clock. I can't speak to Ubuntu except to say that 14 is quite old. For Fedora you really want to be on the latest release. We upgraded our labs to Fedora 28 late last year and are already having to update to Fedora 29 due to serious issues in updates to the former release. Even when there are no problems we find that more packages break with time. Previous releases may still be under "support" but they get less developer love than the latest release. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No. SC013532.
