[Cialug] Fedora?

[Josh More]

Note: in case you are not familiar with the lines, this will help to
make this post more understandable:

      There are numerous "lines" of Linux.  At the time of this
writing, there are three leaders:
      * Debian/Ubuntu
      * RedHat/RHEL/Fedora
      * OpenSUSE/SLES/SLED

Echoing many others, I feel that when you choose a distro, you are
weighing several factors.

1) Use.  Often server vs desktop/laptop.  However, embedded, kiosk,
appliance, etc could also be factors.

2) Life cycle.  Basically, how often do you want to do an upgrade.

3) Legality.  Many functions (mostly multimedia related) have
questionable legality issues so are not bundled into the core OS.  How
easy is this to add in if you want it?

4) Package availability.  How far beyond "basic" do you want to do. 
Bear in mind that further you veer from the standards, the more
difficult the upgrades will be.

5) Core technology.  Basic packaging and such, do you like RPMs, DEBs,
portage, build from source, etc.

6) How well do things work.


To directly answer your question, the reason a lot of people dislike
Fedora for the following reasons:
1) Technologically, Fedora is fine on both servers and laptops, if you
apply the following things.
2) Fedora has about a six-month life cycle.  Personally, I find this
acceptable for desktops, but not for servers.
3) Fedora supports the livna repositories to add the maybe-not-so-legal
packages in.  It works a lot better than it used to, but a lot of people
avoid Fedora because this used to be horrible.
4) Fedora has (IMO) a pretty limited package set.  You can extend this
with the rpmforge/dag/dries/livna repos, but that makes the 6 month
upgrade process more difficult.
5) Personally, I prefer RPMs to the other packaging systems, but that's
a different discussion.  If you're new to Linux, I recommend either RPMs
or DEBs.  Fedora uses RPM.
6) I have found that Fedora requires a fair amount of tweaking if you
veer from the standard base.  This, I suspect, is one of the big reasons
that a lot of people have drifted to other systems.  If all you need is
a basic desktop, it's probably OK.  If you do development, sysadmin
tests, etc, it can get very annoying very quickly.


To round this out, I would like to mention a few other things.

1) For servers, I like to use CentOS or SLES as they are well tested,
and have a huge release cycles.  For workstations, I like OpenSUSE or
SLED due to the active community and wide package set.

2) These days, with the exception of CentOS, you have to pay for
lifecycle.  Professionally, I use SLES here and my company pays for
support.  At home, I use CentOS because it's free.  Generally speaking,
I've had fewer issues with SLES than I have any other Linux distro, and
the fact that it supports Xen out of the box is a big bonus.

3) From a business perspective, the multimedia support is irrelevant. 
At home I use Ubuntu with Automatix on some machines and OpenSUSE with
the Multimedia HOWTO on others.

4) I like both OpenSUSE and Ubuntu with extended repositories for a
full package set.  Either way, I still have to build my own sometimes
(but I tend to stay near the edge for things like that).

5) As I said above, I prefer RPM, which gives OpenSUSE/SLES and
Fedora/RHEL an edge over Ubuntu.

6) I've found that things tend to work "out of the box" better in
Ubuntu and SLED than in other distros.  Since Ubuntu is free, that gives
Ubuntu an edge.  However, when things don't work, I find that I can fix
it faster in OpenSUSE/SLED/SLES than I can in Ubuntu, so long-term I
think that the SUSE-based distros win there.  IMO, Fedora/RHEL is fairly
far behind the others in this respect.


Hope this helps,




 

-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701



>>> "Sean McClanahan" <sean.mcclanahan at westecnow.com> 07/25/07 8:48 AM
>>> 
OK, so being the newbie to Linux that I am, I have to ask:

> 
> I know most of you aren't Fedora fans but if it runs Fedora well it
> should be relatively easy to install your favorite distro.
> 
> Jeff

What issues are there with Fedora that makes it not a favorite distro?
I only ask because I tried running Ubuntu (Dapper Dan) first, and
switched to Fedora 7 on the recommendation of a colleague.  So far, in
my meager use, it seems to be doing everything I ask of it.

Sean



www.westecnow.com 

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