Lately there seems to be a lot of concern with how long Microsoft is taking to develop the next version of Windows. Since people clearly want their operating systems updated faster, allow me to provide a list:

  • Red Hat or SuSE Enterprise Linux. New versions every 12-18 months. (Mandrake Corporate Server seems about the same.)
  • Mac OS. The past few years have seen yearly updates as OS X has settled in, although they plan to slow down now. Last I looked, they hadn’t announced a release date for Tiger (OS 10.4).
  • SuSE Linux or Mandrake Linux. I’m not sure what their timetable is, but they each tend to release at least one new version each year.
  • OpenBSD. New version every 6 months.
  • Fedora Core Linux. New version roughly every 6 months.
  • FreeBSD. New version roughly every 4 months.
  • Gentoo Linux. Quarterly releases.

Of course, those who really need their upgrade fix can go for development branches like Fedora Rawhide, Mandrake Cooker, or Debian Unstable. Not that I’d recommend this for anyone who wasn’t actually working on the product, but hey, you can upgrade your system every day!

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