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Taking more bait?
Taking more bait?
Posted Jul 27, 2007 12:49 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)In reply to: Taking more bait? by dowdle
Parent article: Fedora's mid-life crisis
Why did I take the bait?
Actually, I didn't get any answer to my question: why would I consider switching from Debian/Ubuntu to Fedora, or recommend Fedora to a newcomer?
Perhaps rpm/yum is now as good, or nearly as good, as deb/apt. I doubt anyone would claim it's better. So what is better?
The question also applies to SuSE, Mandriva and others -- what do they offer? I can see what other distros do offer: Linspire and Xandros offer a Windows-like experience, Slackware offers a barebones experience, Gentoo is for ricers, the BSDs offer clean well-thought-out systems with readable source code and (depending on flavour) high performance / support for obscure hardware / paranoid security.
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Why use distro X or Y?
Posted Jul 27, 2007 17:15 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
I could simply reverse the question and ask, why would I want to switch from using Fedora to Debian or Ubuntu? It is all about choice and personal preference.
For me, I like Fedora because of the design, philosophy, project, and people...the rapid development/release cycle... and the fact that they update packages like mad during the lifecycle of a release. I like principles on using free software... and their unwillingness to compromise those.
I prefer using yum and rpm simply because I'm more familiar with them.
I like the various things I've stated before... about them willing to take more risks and use bleeding edge software (advancing development of them and maturing them faster by getting them into the hands of the user), advancing new technologies... like SELinux, Xen, KVM, etc. I like that Fedora is considered somewhat of a kernel testing platform because their kernels are usually very close to latest Linux kernel releases... and that gets the kernel tested by more users.
I like the fact that it is sponsored by Red Hat and all of the people that they employ to work on various GPLed products such as the Linux kernel, Xorg, gcc, etc. Red Hat really gives back to the community with the vast amount of development work they sponsor.
Those are just some reasons I came up with in short order so it isn't a comprehensive test. Perhaps they'd work for you, perhaps not.
For servers, I prefer RHEL and CentOS (more stable, longer support, more conservative, backed by the large server OEMS) and using Fedora on the desktop helps me get a glipse of what is coming... basically from every third release of Fedora.
There may be people who prefer the Fedora properties on a server, but I'm not one of them.