Amos Shapira wrote:
The goal of trying to stick with LTS was to get a stable system - one where Skype will work with my webcam, mic and speaker, Firefox won't blow up on me and play Flash. I'm now with 9.04 which took a while to get Speaker working and mic doesn't work, I don't know whether it's a Skype problem or hardware except that the mic used to work with ALSA until PulseAudio was thrust on me. I'm not a gamer and don't have time to play with the latest and greatest, I just need to Get Things Done(tm) - monitor my work network (which is based on CentOS 5, great support and stability, BTW), browsing, e-mail (gmail, hosted exchange server (another sore point), skype (which doesn't do voice for months now), printing (which loses the printer every time it changes IP address).
The reason that "stable" distros such as RHEL and CentOS and LTS exist is so that IT managers don't go into system shock when they are told they need to upgrade their stable servers every 6 months. So things like RHEL and LTS are based on known-working-in-a-datacentre packages where urgent bug fixes and security issues are fixed only, without any new functionality being added (e.g. to get newfangled devices working), and support is typically provided for 5-7 years.
I and I'm sure many others have had much success getting RHEL, CentOS or LTS going on large numbers of servers in big data centres where long term stability is important.
One of the things that the stable distros tend to miss out on is having the latest updated device drivers. What it sounds like you're doing is trying to get stuff working that while not bleeding-edge, probably does require updated kernels and recent device drivers. So it sounds like LTS isn't for you.
Most of the recent (e.g. Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 11, openSUSE 11, etc) distros we've played with have pretty good flash support, work well with webcams, mics, speakers, and have reasonably recent Firefoxes that tend not to explode. On the other hand CentOS 5.3 (which I use on my older desktop) has a Firefox that's a few revisions old.
One of the tricks to getting Firefox, flash, skype etc, working well is to use a 32 bit distro rather than a 64 bit one.
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