The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

Posted Jun 14, 2005 5:40 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577)
Parent article: The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

Honest opinion needed.

How does Fedora compare to Ubuntu? Do I need to build or install
unsupported packages to get a working desktop box?

I see that KDE is supported. Does Fedora keep up to date with new
releases?

I'm having the rather uncomfortable experience of binary distributions
after a borked gentoo install needed to be replaced in a few hours. Are
they all this bad?

Derek (the gentoo install was three years old and like all three year
olds needed a bit of cleaning up)

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

Posted Jun 14, 2005 7:34 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Both distros come with a working desktop. However, both distros lack out of the box support for patent encumbered media codecs (which is pretty much a given if you want to put out a free of charge distro).

As far as staying up to date, both distros come out at roughly 6 month intervals, so one is likely to be more up to date than the other at any one time but never by more than 6 months. You won't generally see new versions of packages being added to an existing version of the distro -- only security updates and critical bug fixes. If you really need bleeding edge packages, both distros have corresponding development distros, so you can track the development of the next stable release.

If you need stuff outside of the main distribution, Fedora provides a "Fedora Extras" repository and Ubuntu has a "universe" repository. Universe is larger than Extras, which could be a deciding factor.

The other differences are in details like package management system (apt vs. yum), system config tools (gnome-system-tools vs. system-config-*) and some distro specific customisations.