Why people don't use Fedora? | Hacker News Reader

Why people don't use Fedora?

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33 pointsGutenYe59 comments

The question is more: why are people moving away from Fedora, when you look at the stats: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics. Fedora 14 was way more used than any other later version.

I think this is related to the brokenness of the system: they pushed early a lot of the debatable technologies (*Kit, NM, systemd) that were not really ready at the time (this is a choice that can make sense) and they argued that the lack of polish was OK for developers, and moved on without "finishing" them. I kind of disagree on this latter point, and this is sometimes way too frustrating (I think the Arch way is more suited on this). And as this is not a rolling release, you need to wait a long time to get the fixes.

Their approach to multimedia, codecs and patents is also one of the more ridiculous of the Linux distributions. And that is pushing also a lot of users out of Fedora, IMHO.

As a long-time Fedora developer (and a member of FESCo during the switch over to systemd), I take offense at the idea that we claimed a lack of polish was okay. Far from it; we've spent a lot of time and effort in finishing up all of the tools you just described. I gather from your statements here that you haven't actually run Fedora in the recent past.

Did some of these things land before they were absolutely perfect? Of course. Someone has to be the first to deliver something. You can never figure out what your software is lacking until someone is using it. Fedora takes risks. As we've seen time and time again, once Fedora proves that something works (and has made the effort to polish it up), the other distributions generally pick them up and run with them. NetworkManager, systemd, SSSD, etc... all of these came to Fedora first, were improved upon there and then were adopted widely.

I keep having to remind people: Fedora does have a rolling release. It's called Rawhide and you can move any currently-supported Fedora system to it by running 'fedup --network rawhide'. This will always carry all of the packages that will become the next version of Fedora. It's fairly stable these days (not like its early history, where only the exceptionally brave would dare install it).

Lastly, our approach to codecs and proprietary device drivers is entirely because our hands are tied by legal obligations that other distributions don't have to deal with. (Canonical incorporated in a tax-haven country specifically to avoid this problem; many other distributions simply don't have an entity involved with sufficient money to be worth suing). We know it's an issue. It's one of the reasons Red Hat, Inc. is lobbying so heavily for patent reform in the United States. There are mechanisms out there for getting these tools (such as third-party repositories maintained by our non-US community), but if we tried to ship them in Fedora, we'd immediately be sued into nonexistence. So we have to choose the bad option instead of the catastrophic one.

As a perl developer, have some feedback on why i stopped using Fedora five years ago, fleeing to anything remotely more sane:

You guys actually thought it was a good idea to include Perl, but make the unilateral decision to cut out pieces of the Perl core just so the damn thing can fit on a cd-rom, forcing Perl developers in bad corporate environments to deploy Perl core libraries manually.

Not that you're alone in that, but you and your ilk will always have my ire and negative feedback to execs on that until you learn to behave and make amends.

Although I use it exclusively for the past 5 years, I can see at least 2 reasons why others don't:

1) 13-month support per release. i.e. no LTS support

2) Marketing. And by "marketing" I mean lack of marketing from Fedora/RedHat and too much marketing from Cannonical, which has persuaded people that Ubuntu is more stable and user-friendly for "human beings".

For #2 I can say that I find Fedora more stable(by far) and as for user-friendliness I can't see what more Ubuntu(which I've used for 2 years) has to offer.

Ad 1: Do anyone really need LTS for desktop OS? Especially since it's quite experimental distro so rapid changes and experimental solutions are part of what Fedora is.

Yes a lot of people do need it. And by desktop use, although I wasn't clear enough, I mean software development too.

As for the "experimental" and "rapid changes", I can assure you it is far more stable than Ubuntu by miles and miles. Just don't install it at the first day of its release; wait for a month or two.

Yes

I want a workstation, not a system that's continuously having things begin/stop working

Fix A, breaks B, etc.

I also want to be able to install something slightly older for not so great hardware and have it be useful.

Ubuntu provides less than a year of support for non-LTS releases. Anecdotally, this is quite annoying because the overlap between two consecutive non-LTS releases is normally a couple of months and their quality control for new releases is not great.

No change is appreciated by many. People used XP because it was the same experience overall (tweaked by updates). A lot of people (without access to legit installs / copies of recent versions that are even worse copies, or lack of awareness) still use XP. It is the easiest (read: most familiar) version of Windows in existence even today. LTS is the equivalent of that.

Yes. Now I regret I upgraded my Ubuntu to 15.04 Since there is no support for cuda from NVIDIA, so is the Intel graphic driver. If you are using an OS without third party applications, I think it should be fine, but that is not the most case.

#1 is the reason I abandoned Fedora too. Things change so quickly and break so often that it was too much effort to maintain the machines I was using it on. I replaced it with CentOS.

... which is the entire point of Fedora and EL (CentOS, Scientific Linux, RHEL) - Fedora is fast moving, EL is stable.

FWIW, I've used Fedora for my primary work system (laptop, actually) for years. Never had it seriously break unless I did something stupid, and the fix was always simple. Bugs that I hit (mostly video) would have been encountered in any distribution.

> which has persuaded people that Ubuntu is more stable and user-friendly

But it's the truth - Fedora is explicitly bleeding edge with the premise that things may be broken/inconvenient. This and the hard stance on keeping non-free Software out of the repository makes it a not very user friendly distribution.

(The last time I tried it, it bothered me way too much with SELinux too)

Yes you're right on all counts and I blame their marketing team for all, except the SELinux bit.

They're trying to be overly honest, when they say things might be broken etc. The reality is though that it's far less broken and more stable than all the Ubuntu releases I've used. Also, at least when something is broken on Fedora you know it'll be fixed in the next update or so. But with Ubuntu? OMG, the same 10 bugs that annoyed me in the initial install, were still there after 1-2 years.

About the non-free software, they could just add a script that automagically adds these, after you've signed off your soul to the devil and whichever license agreement. The same that happens in all other distros basically. Lost opportunity there :(

And finally the SELinux part. Yeah, so: $ cat /etc/selinux/config

SELINUX=disabled

I know of no person that has it enabled, since you can't do any serious work without pulling your hair out. They should do something about it indeed.

I'm glad you have found Fedora to be very stable. It's something we work very, very hard to accomplish. Fedora has long-since stopped referring to itself as "bleeding-edge", though. We've adopted the term "leading-edge" instead, which we intend to mean that we always try to ship the latest stable version of software, rather than in the early days where it was always the latest version. (There's a subtle but important difference there).

As for the non-free software, device drivers, etc.: I really wish it was just that simple. We have had lawyers working for years trying to find a way to do that, but the simple fact of the matter is that Fedora's sponsor is Red Hat, Inc. which is incorporated in the USA. A lot of really terrible laws are in place in the US that mean that if we even tried to do what you are suggesting, it puts us at risk of something called "contributory infringement". Basically, it means that we can be sued in the United States for every person that uses a script we provide for acquiring non-free software in a way that constitutes infringement. For most other distros, they usually just take the risk because they don't have a wealthy backer that could be targeted by patent lawyers. For Ubuntu, they incorporated in the Isle of Man tax-haven specifically because they don't have a treaty with the USA that would get in the way.

As for SELinux, I've been running with SELinux in enforcing mode as a developer for the last seven years. It has been a very long time since it stopped me from accomplishing anything I should be expecting to have work. Occasionally there are bugs in it, but with the advent of SELinux Troubleshooter, I can click a button to allow the action for the moment and send a bug to the SELinux developers who will update the policy, usually within a week.

SELinux has come a long way in the last few years, and I think you'd be surprised to see how much less obtrusive it is. Most people I know that have it turned off have simply done so because they've been doing it that way for 5+ years and have simply assumed that nothing has changed.

Wow. Thank you for this informative comment. I didn't know about all these legal complications.

As for the SELinux stuff, yeah I know it's come a long way and I've been meaning to learn to use it at some point. I even bought a book a few months ago!

Thanks for your work on Fedora :)

SELinux by default has gotten a lot more usable over the years, so that in most cases, the only thing you need to know about is "setsebool" to turn the can_network_connect boolean on for Apache processes (in my practice, anyway).

It's worth leaving running, and much easier than it used to be.

Because Ubuntu LTS provides the right level of hardware support I expect from a consumer grade OS, for the few use cases where I still use GNU/Linux outside work.

Fedora was interesting to use around 10 years ago.

Still, my favorite distros back when I was full into GNU/Linux were Mandrake and SuSE.

I used Fedora for about six months as my desktop OS a couple of years ago. It was my first "real" choice using linux. I started with Ubuntu because it was so popular at the time and I wanted to try something new so I chose Fedora because it had the latest and greatest software. That sounds awesome in theory, but in practice I was constantly having things break when I updated my system. The final straw for me was the kernel modules for virtualbox. I do all my web development in VirtualBox VM's and when I was stuck waiting for Virtual Box to release the new kernel modules so that I could get working again the pain was significant enough to warrant a change. I know that is an issue with Virtual Box and not Fedora, but I never have that problem now that I've moved away from Fedora. Looking back, it could have been possible that if I had built Virtual Box from source instead of installing from yum, I may have been okay, but I was still not that comfortable with linux at the time. I switched to Mint, and have been happy with that distro. I really liked Fedora, but if I'm being honest, I've been happier with mint.

You could just add linux-kernel to ignored upates list, that would have solved VM tools breaking.

I bet some people did. But when you look at the population as a whole, it probably looks like 5% "I can add linux-kernel to the ignored updates list," and 95% "I'm switching back to Ubuntu because it breaks less."

I don't think the problems of running a specific distro in a VM applies to general population at all ;) Only a small percentage of developers will ever face the issue, and googling a fix is faster than re-installing whole OS.

I don't think anything about running Fedora applies to the general population at all! :P

I'm sure I'm not a typical user, but I've definitely had more Linux VMs than I've had native installs. Even if it's not a majority, I don't think it's uncommon.

From what I seen this is an issue between the main Fedora repo and RpmFusion. The nvidia drivers have the same issue.

Fedora upgrades the kernel, but RpmFusion havn't re-built kernel modules yet. So you do an yum upgrade, and are left with a new kernel, without the modules you need. There's the akmod- modules that's supposed to recompile itself on a kernel upgrade, but in my experience that works about half the time.

Small things like this gets old really fast. Even if there's workarounds, people will have to remember those, and it's easier to find an alternative that just works instead of listening to people saying "but that's because" or "you can just".

Redhat is all I new since the late 90's. I'd played around with Debian and Slack a little, but I was die-hard Redhat. Bought the packaged versions, ran it at work and home, servers and workstations

When Fedora came out, I stuck with it. But it didn't feel right. Somewhere around FC 5 or 6 I tried to find a new distro, and didn't like Ubuntu for whatever reason. Too easy. Too mainstream. Too 'brown'. But I ended up using it, and still do to this day.

Back to Fedora:

There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.

There aren't many other users. Chicken and the egg. The support forums, IRC channels, etc aren't as active as Ubuntu. Ubuntu has it's own (very active) StackExchange site!

Let's say I want to use some library and don't want to build it by hand. Chances are someone else using Ubuntu already has it figured out and there's a script I can copy/paste, or a package I can install. Often times that doesn't exist on Fedora and I could make it work but it's just so much easier with so many other people using it and sharing.

    There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.

That's what CentOS is for.

No it's not the same. I use Fedora(desktop) and CentOS for servers where I can. But you can't compare CentOS with Ubuntu LTS. CentOS is unfortunately way too far behind in package releases. You get a very stable server environment but you can't realistically use it for any modern Desktop work.

Believe me if you could, I would :)

Which packages? CentoOS 7 is running a lot of the same software as Ubuntu 15.04 LTS (which just came out last week or so).

Well do you remember the chrome issue? http://www.linuxveda.com/2013/02/11/rhel-obsolete-by-google/

Also, last time I checked, KDE, which I use, was many releases behind. Also, in Centos6 which had python 2.6.5(IIRC) was a PITA to update. Actually you couldn't so you had to maintain a source-based installation of 2.7.X side by side. In general you ended up having a source distribution, because the repos had really old stuff. For web development stuff, it was really impossible to have it as your main system.

Maybe CentOS 7 is a bit better, but still I don't think you can use it for modern desktop/devel operations.

Ever since Fedora 18 you can use the same install and upgrade to the next Fedora release (or alpha/beta) using fedup:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp

My Thinkpad X220/X230 (hard drive swapped a lot) has the same "install" for years now.

As for community and resources I feel Fedora has come a long way since you used it. I disagree with your statement that they are not as active. There are tons of active Fedora users. IRC on freenode is very active and online resources are getting better to figure out your problems. RPM fusion and EPEL repositories have pretty much everything I have needed that isn't supplied by Fedora out of the box.

Also, if you sign up for a redhat bugzilla.redhat.com account and use ABR to submit crashes and issues, things actually get fixed. At least in my experience.

Fedora 21 Beta has been great for me. Maybe give it a try. :)

There are a lot of users on Ubuntu forums, but a lot of the answers are pretty poor.

People do use Fedora. In particular, it serves as a great place to try out new features prior to them hitting RHEL, and is widely used as a development platform.

It has a very fast release cycle, however, so it's not always something you want to deploy in production if you still want security updates (fine if you can easily replace your cloud instances though) -- though there are QUITE a many folks running some impressive Fedora deployments in production, including renderfarms and chip design clusters.

I use Fedora, as you mentioned, as a development platform. I develop software that manages, among other things, IBM MQ which technically runs on RHEL, but also runs on Fedora for development. Why use Fedora and not RHEL then? Because Fedora has the latest emacs, git, etc. which makes it a much nicer development platform. If I had to actually develop on RHEL I'd probably gouge my eyes out due to older versions of the tools I use. For a long time, emacs in particular was really, really old. I think it's better now, but I still like Fedora.

I'm not sure to see the point of the submission here, the only answer to the question I can see is:

> So, I switched to Arch after almost 3 blue years. And the only why left for me is because others do it better!

Which is funny because people don't use Arch as much as they use Fedora.

[[citation needed]]

Agreed. The actual submission provided no value and left me confused. The HN comments have been interesting though (as expected).

There is the question and the answer is "It's obvious". That's not a reasonable starting point for a discussion.

I used it a while back when I worked at a place that used Linux desktops. I liked it over Ubuntu since yum/rpm is so much faster than deb/apt and because they just seemed to give you a good solid system that just worked. They weren't "trying too hard."

I also like Gnome 3. I realize I may be a minority there, but it was/is a nice UI that just did the basics well: fast, doesn't look like Windows 95 or otherwise like crap, launches my apps, lets me organize them, and otherwise stays out of my way. It supports some nice stuff copied from OS X like being able to move your mouse to a corner and seeing all your windows, etc., and did not seem bug-ridden.

I never had quality problems. Installed fine, worked fine. Hardware support was decent, though these were Dell machines which historically tend to run Linux well. Upgrading was a pain though. I would basically just reinstall.

I was using Fedora 16 through 19.

I was using Red Hat on desktop way before there was Fedora. Eventually I switched to Debian and later Ubuntu (since 5.10). I have tried Fedora a couple of times, but I was always disappointed that the system doesn't work out of the box. I have to deal with drivers, I have to install external repositories, etc. Ubuntu always just worked and I get a fully usable system right after installation. That was the main reason why I switched from Debian and why I will not be switching to Fedora.

Personally I consider Fedora to be a testbed for Redhat's RHEL, but honestly I don't know if this is true. A bit like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases are a testbed for their LTSes.

With Ubuntu I have pretty much the same system on my servers and on my desktop (I currently use Netrunner[1] because I want a system similar to Ubuntu on our servers -- otherwise I'd be running Arch[2] or NixOS[3]).

If I'd have chosen RHEL/CentOS for on the servers I _might_ use Fedora on my desktop. But in the absence of a huge desktop-oriented community like Ubuntu-and-derivatives have, I would probably feel a little lonely.

Maybe others are also afraid for this loneliness.

1: Netrunner Ubuntu (or Arch) with KDE and sane defaults (like Adblockers) -- http://www.netrunner-os.com/

2: Arch Linux, a rolling-release distro -- https://www.archlinux.org

3: NixOS is to other distros, what Haskell is to other programming languages -- http://nixos.org

I use Arch on all my servers and it really works quite well. You have very little magic, very quick updates and generally things just work.

Instead of why are they not using, why would you use Fedora? In my view, because you want to be familiar with the ecosystem and potential future changes if you are supporting CentOS/RedHat but want newer features for your worknix. If the above isn't your use case, I would say Fedora has done some very nice bleeding edge stuff, so if you are the kind of person who likes Arch but doesn't like all the manual labor, Fedora might be up your alley.

I do know that I was very impressed with Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2014, until I realized that the proprietary video drivers refused to work in UEFI/BIOS mode. A deal breaker because I'm working on Unreal Engine 4 linux native editor, otherwise I probably would be using it.

edit: Also, I installed both latest stable and beta (22 I think), and some of the issues related to the rawhide packaging production cycle, so I plan on trying it again once 22 is out and/or when the repos are updated for it.

The way I understood it was that WAY back(which is just a 5+ years but that's way back in internet years) tons of people used Fedora for development. I seemed to come into the mix about the time things started swinging toward debian/ubuntu and now some other flavours.. My take on this is that change and adoption in the wider developer space has just been increasing like mad.. RedHat is not exactly the platform of the latest and greatest.

Now, I'm not discounting RedHat/Fedora in any way with this but times a change'n. Used to be years old stable releases were the best bet for stability. Now with progress in development and testing how many projects recommend the latest stable release? Other server distros offer recent-ish packages that are very widely used and tested so it's no surprise to me that a lot of development platform usage is trending toward these same distros.

I'm still mad that Redhat spun off fedora in the first place, 3 days before the announcement I had bought a boxed copy. I returned it, and switched to Suse. Then when Suse got buddy buddy with Microsoft I switched to Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, and now back to Ubuntu.

I used Fedora quite happily on my laptop for years until I bought a Macbook. I also used it as a production system for my projects for almost 10 years. Enjoyed the availability of new versions of packages and don't remember encountering many stability issues. But eventually I got tired of the short support lifecycle and switched to CentOS.

I use it... I'm not sure how people are having all these issues with Fedora and I am not? I run it on both a desktop (custom built) and a laptop (Dell M4800). It's my everyday and work OS.

I used to use Fedora. I guess it was OK. These days, I prefer Ubuntu. I find it simpler and I like apt better than yum. Not that I use Linux all that much; I mostly live inside my OSX terminal.

Could you explain what you like better in apt? To me it doesn't make sense.

apt-get, apt-file, apt-cache, apt-blah. And apart from apt-get, the others are not even in the default install(IIRC). Why? Seriously, I don't get it. With yum, there's only yum.

Plus I think that yum handled more gracefully iterrupted operations, but maybe they fixed that in apt by now.

+ Delta updates in Fedora is awesome

> Could you explain what you like better in apt?

It has been some years since I used Fedora (FC5 or FC6). I remember the default yum repositories were missing utilities I wanted and I was also installing stuff from RPM files more often than I would have liked.

Another reason for switching was Ubuntu seemed to have a bigger community and it was easier to get help (at the time, I was still pretty new). Plus it was so much easier to get started with Ubuntu's Live CDs.

I used to use Fedora, but the updating process never worked for me so I switched to Arch. I am really enjoying the rolling release model, though it is a bit less stable than Fedora.

I've used Fedora, off and on, for many years and Red Hat before it, back in the late 90's.

I still have 2/3 of my machines on Fedora. My main development workstation is running Arch now and I plan to migrate my music production workstation and my all-rounder ultrabook as well.

Despite moving away from Fedora, I really can't say much against it and little against it that's actually in favor of Arch or any other distro.

It's a good solid distribution. The only real pain points are installing non-free drivers and that some things aren't packaged for it. I'm comfortable repackaging things, doing manual installs, or adding necessary repos--no distribution has 100% of all software ever created in its repositories.

I mainly switched to Arch because I wanted a rolling release distribution where I wouldn't feel "left behind" after a couple of years of being too lazy to reinstall my whole OS. (Which is different than LTS, because I want more than just security updates and fixes, I want the latest everything, forever.)

The secondary reasons I ended up liking Arch are the AUR and that Arch does much MUCH less for you out of the box in terms of default configurations etc than Fedora does and I was getting a bit frustrated with not having things the way I wanted them while having default configurations that were adequate enough to settle for.. so I wanted a distribution that would be basically almost unconfigured after installation so that I would arrive at the configuration I wanted. In this regard, Arch has been better than Fedora but that isn't "user-friendly" that's more "user-challenging".

Either way, Fedora is a good distro, I would recommend it to a raw newbie or a power user. I can't really say anything other than that, it's definitely Linux. It's also really easy to install. (I auditioned Ubuntu and some Ubuntu-derived distributions some time ago found things like getting my RAID working at install-time to be impossible. I use BTRFS now, but I was trying to use my mobo's RAID-controller then.. which was trivial in Fedora and not happening in Ubuntu.)

If you're curious to know what I don't like about Arch.. it's that updates seem like they should be done pretty regularly and I'm not in the habit of rebooting more than about 2-3 times a year. There was even a year in recent history where I did not reboot once and my uptime was somewhere around 1 year before I irrationally became worried that I didn't -know- that my computer was capable of booting because I hadn't tested that capability in so long, so I rebooted it and then updated just to demonstrate to myself that it would work.

It forces me to do a distribution upgrade every 6 months or so.

I use it here and there.

I think Gnome 3 doesn't quite "do" polish as much as Unity. I am very fussy about fonts looking right, and I'm afraid that at smaller sizes, the font scaling in the Gnome terminal just looked wrong, whereas Unity is perfect in this sense. It's a tiny detail, but Unity kind of feels as polished as a Mac. It also has better dual-monitor support because you can independently set the font scaling for different dpi on internal/external monitor. Crucial if you run a high-dpi notebook in conjunction with a normal fullhd monitor. On Fedora Gnome I had ugly mis-sized title bars and UI fonts on at least one of my monitors.

Second, I do CUDA development, and there are three Cuda 7.0 toolkits downloadable for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 right now, but Fedora 21 is still "coming soon" and has been "coming soon" now for over 6 weeks. Deja vu a few times already on this. Moved back to 14.04, even though I loved the progressive ideas and clean look in Gnome 3.

I still run Fedora on a cubietruck for fun: no problems, works well, but I use the e17 desktop which is a fantastic retro reminder of the 90s if you need an antidote to Jony Ive. It's fast, lean, unapollageticaly black, and terminology looks great and has some neat features for inline graphics if you're a terminal junky.

You should generally be able to get the RHEL 7 CUDA releases running on whatever you are currently using. For instance, Arch gets CUDA updates usually on the same day.

I really hate the fact that the default desktop (Gnome) copied a bunch of anti-patterns from OS X, like the universal title bar, no taskbar, mixing folders with files, etc. I find OS X to be the least user friendly OS on multiple levels - they leave out critical functionality (while claiming their shit is somehow better) or they hide it.

But, I use it anyway because it has less issues than Ubuntu and with the Gnome Tweak Tool and some extensions I can fix many of the annoyances.

All the money Ubuntu spent for promotion.

For laymen Linux = Ubuntu.

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