[timwilky]

Not necessarily sue, we use a large number of hi end engineering calculation and design packages that have been certified by their developers to run on a certain flavour of linux. What we do not have is access to their certification process/methodology etc.

By adding 3rd party stuff, we can no longer argue that the platform still conforms to that standard and without fully testing each application to its developers standard we can no long guarantee installed applications still work as designed. To add to complications I was this morning reading a product install guide that says it runs on Redhat Linux 3 & 4. Now our standard deploy is 5.3. So we end up with work stations at lower revisions of the OS simply because one supplier is too lazy to certify their software, or more likely update their documentation. Which means the poor engineer has 2 systems on his desk at different revisions simply because of the software he requires.