I keep being tempted to move to something other than Ubuntu. Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" so I think I'm going to wind up installing this to see how it looks these days.
Anyone use Fedora regularly?
Anyone use Fedora regularly?
edit: Plus, I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's products, so I like to be loyal :)
- There's a huge amount of Ubuntu branding and renaming. I initially paid attention to this after the pretty silent updates that added "Ubuntu branding" to Firefox. I saw a lot of packages and applications that were renamed (or at least represented differently) to make them more generic. Personally, I would rather use the raw software and see the real names for the software packages. Fedora does this a bit too, but to a lesser extent.
- The interface is very polished, but I like having a very raw, stripped-down interface. I generally work quickly, and I can't stand it when the OS can't keep up. I like KDE, and this can be a memory hog, but Ubuntu's additions are even worse, IMO. It was getting harder and harder with each version of Ubuntu to get the interface where I wanted, and now that they're branching away from standard GNOME, I only see this getting worse.
- On that note, I was very unimpressed by Kubuntu, as it had obviously not received the same quality of attention as Ubuntu. As I prefer to use KDE and LXDE, I appreciate the very consistent quality between all the "spins" of Fedora.
- SELinux and hard-drive encryption work out of the box. Again, I'm sure I could get this running just fine on Ubuntu, but it's so much easier with Fedora, so this contributed to me just feeling more at home.
- The kernel had been modified a ton before it got shipped in a release. When I recompiled a kernel it wreaked havoc on some of the software that had previously relied on the added functionality. On Fedora I rebooted into a vanilla kernel and had no problems.
I realize some of these are pretty abstract reasons, but these seem to be directions they're heading more and more, so as I said, I just feel more at home on Fedora, now that I'm comfortable using Linux.
I think Ubuntu should have versions/spins like Fedora. I think it's confusing for the end user with their odd branding Kubuntu etc. How about Ubuntu - Education Edition, Ubuntu - Lightweight Edition, Ubuntu - Netbook Edition - something like that instead.
I'm curious - how do you like Debian?
I like to drive my computer with the keyboard. I tried to avoid Gnome on my last install, but it's keyboard config, theme manager and Nautilus won over other desktops. I use metacity, which is boring but good.
To be honest I'm not totally enamoured with any Linux distro. But I like the ones that try to remain free. Oh and the ones that work with my hardware.
My work's servers use Debian, and my home ISP runs an unmetered repository for it too.
I've tried Fedora in the past when I was still very much a newbie and found it intimidating. Given I know next to nothing about Red Hat derivatives of Linux it would probably pay to get familiar with them sometime over the next few months.
Red Hat (where I work) has a large team of people dedicated entirely to virtualization, so for that use, particularly higher-end server virt, it's getting very good.
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top/
http://libguestfs.org/ has a lot of OCaml for internal stuff. The tools are written in Perl, but I wish they were written in OCaml :-)
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/guestfs-browser/
Another forthcoming tool which I can't mention yet.
More projects here from the company I used to work for:
You will find that Fedora and Ubuntu are largely equal. However, coming from a .deb based distro you will probably find all the minor differences in RPM based distros really annoying; I feel the same frustration whenever I use Debian or Ubuntu.
Wow, way back in 2007? Did you have to enter your programs on punch cards back then? :-)
I use Fedora, and for the past few years it seems like every couple of months an update breaks something, like sound or wifi. Upgrades from one release to another are practically guaranteed to break something. So a while ago when I got a new laptop I installed ubuntu on it instead, hoping that things would be better. But after living with ubuntu for a while I didn't feel like it was any more stable, so I went back to Fedora just because that's what I know best. The vast majority of the bugs I run into are introduced upstream and both distros just pass them along for me to find.
Apt is still faster than yum, and Ubuntu still seems to have somewhat more packages available than Fedora, but Fedora has closed the gap in both areas in recent years. All in all, I don't see a strong argument for either one over the other.
As others have noted, it's a bit more cutting edge than Ubuntu, which is fine, but some times cutting edges leaves you bleeding. I prefer to stay one step behind, ie now that Fedora 14 is out, it must be about time for me to move to Fedora 13 :) I find that the first 3 months or so of a distribution's life cycle tend to be a bit unstable, but you could probably safely upgrade after that time, no need to stay an entire cycle behind like I do, it's just that I tend to be rather cautious!
That way, you won't be dissuaded by someone else's opinion, and you won't have to explain your metrics to them.
Having said that, I mostly agree with the other posters on this thread: Ubuntu is for your "I just want it to work" types, and Fedora is for sysadmin-hackery-types.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F TOTAL UNIQUE IPs: 25,719,833