What is Fedora's competitor? [LWN.net]

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 3:44 UTC (Thu) by jonth (guest, #4008)
Parent article: What is Fedora?

I think that Mike has missed the true elephant in the room: Debian. The reason Ubuntu manages to be such a compelling "out of the box" experience is that it takes 6-monthly snapshots of Debian "unstable" and then polishes it until it shines.

But "unstable" itself seems to pull off the trick that Rawhide does not: It moves fast, but is completely usable and very rarely broken. I don't know why it is able to do this: possibly it's down to something as simple as apt, or possibly it's the Debian policy. Either way, I believe it's important to understand that the true competitor to Fedora is Debian, not Ubuntu.

In other words, Debian->Ubuntu == Fedora->Redhat

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What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:07 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

Rawhide tends to be even more bleeding edge since Fedora tends to do a lot more upstream development and tends to integrate upstream components directly very soon but yes, stabilizing the development branch of Fedora is part of the goal. A few important measures including splitting up the development repository via "no frozen rawhide" proposal and running automated tests via AutoQA project

https://fedorahosted.org/autoqa/

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:31 UTC (Thu) by jonth (guest, #4008) [Link] (4 responses)

I guess that implies Rawhide is closer to Debian's "experimental," which really _isn't_ for the faint of heart.

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:19 UTC (Thu) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (2 responses)

>I guess that implies Rawhide is closer to Debian's "experimental," which >really _isn't_ for the faint of heart.

Debian experimental == Fedora rawhide
Debian unstable == Fedora
Debian stable/Ubuntu == Red Hat Enterprise Linux

In fact a Fedora release is best at very end, when updates are slow and most bugs are fixed. However, then all of sudden: No more security patches for you! And you have move to the next release with are lot of bugs and new "features".

I miss the best distro I have ever used: Red Hat Linux.

Talk about elephants in rooms

Posted Nov 1, 2009 11:42 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

You are missing the most used by far Debian branch: Debian testing. It is ideal for desktop used, continuously updated and breaks seldom if ever: for me it's been several years of rock-solid desktop use, with a trickle of bugs that get fixed before stable. Now that it has security support there is really little to complain about. If Fedora needs a role model I would suggest they study Debian testing closely.

Talk about elephants in rooms

Posted Nov 1, 2009 17:06 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Debian ceased security support for testing after the release of lenny:

http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/
http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/...

AFAICT that hasn't resumed yet.

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:34 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I don't think repositories map 1:1 on like that. If you still want to compare, the new rawhide proposal creates two repositories that roughly map to experimental and unstable. Fedora release schedule is bi-yearly one with a ~13 months updates cycle.

RHEL is derived from a subset of Fedora packages (~2500 in EL vs 15,000 + in Fedora) and they are forked and maintained in parallel to Fedora releases for 7 to 10 years. So doesn't map to Debian well either since none of distributions (except for EL rebuilds) have such a long release cycle.

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 12:41 UTC (Thu) by james_w (guest, #51167) [Link] (1 responses)

> But "unstable" itself seems to pull off the trick that Rawhide does not:
> It moves fast, but is completely usable and very rarely broken. I don't
> know why it is able to do this: possibly it's down to something as simple
> as apt, or possibly it's the Debian policy.

One thing is that a majority of developers (I believe the vast majority,
but I may be wrong), and lots of users run unstable all the time.

From the little I know from the outside it doesn't sound to me as though a
majority of Fedora developers and power users run rawhide, at least for a
large part of the cycle, is that the case?

Thanks,

James

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:40 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yeah, that is a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. There are other reasons as well. With a short time based release cycle and updates that often include new features users get the latest stuff quickly and don't have to run Rawhide.

Fedora has multiple branches in parallel (Fedora 13 - Fedora 10 now for instance not counting EPEL 4 and EPEL 5) that you can't really keep track of all of the changes easily from a developer perspective.