Fedora 8 A Serious Threat to Ubuntu

Tubs writes "According to MadPenguin.org's latest article, Fedora 8 from Red Hat is a serious threat to Ubuntu. The author writes, "I was never that swept up with past releases of Fedora. There was nothing compelling about it. But for the first time, I cannot help but feel that the Fedora team has been spoon fed an extra helping of Wheaties, which has put them into overdrive with their accessibility efforts."

Minor correction.

[palegray.net]

Fedora is an upgrade treadmill. With Fedora, you're stuck upgrading every 12 months or so, or you can't get security updates anymore. With Fedora, install an LTS version and you're covered for 5 years on the server. That's why I switched.

I think you wanted the bolded text to read "Ubuntu".

Re:Linux Wars?

[kripkenstein]

I wouldn't consider one open-source project to be a danger to another...

That's a good point.

Also, TFA has absolutely no content on which to base its claims. It mentions 4 things, PulseAudio, CodecBuddy, Spins, and the Fedora theme. Ubuntu 8.04 will have PulseAudio; in fact, this is just another example of the usual relationship of Fedora and Ubuntu - Fedora is slightly more 'on the edge', Ubuntu is a little more stable - but still, at least in non-LTS versions, quite risk-taking. Regarding CodecBuddy, Ubuntu has this, and in fact had it before Fedora. Spins are fairly meaningless - a nice idea, but let's see some compelling implementation. And anyhow both Ubuntu and Fedora welcome 'spins' aka derivative versions; Ubuntu has its own Kubuntu/Edubuntu/etc. as well as the non-official Mint, etc.

Finally, the theme. Well, he's got me there, Fedora does win in that respect. I don't mind the Ubuntu brown, but they aren't doing something nice enough with it so far. However Ubuntu 8.04 will have a brand new theme with a lot of effort put into it, so here's hoping.

Returning to your point, in fact most of these examples prove it. Fedora led the way with PulseAudio; Ubuntu saw it was possible, and will now do it as well. They might even benefit from the code. Similarly, Ubuntu led the way with CodecBuddy-type things, which Fedora wisely adopted. Hopefully Fedora's nice theme will encourage Ubuntu to focus more on that. Thus, we have in effect excellent examples of how FOSS project spur each other to better and greater things.

Re:Umm, no.

[siride]

Quite true, since so many people falsely believe RPM is inferior, when it is, in fact, superior to deb in almost every way. Having worked with both, including making my own RPMs and specfiles, I can safely say, that using RPM is a dream compared to trying to do anything interesting with apt.

Re:Wake me up....

[rasjani]

And things have changed how exactly from days of when redhat was redhat and there was no fedora? Gone worse ?

Seriously. How many redhat releases there where ? 9 majors if i remember right and few .1 and .2 releases + the ee versions. So, how much time have gone into 8 fedora releases ? How and how much progress has happened in them ? Does redhat still back up fedora development, do they provide services like bugzilla/mailinglists, mirrors, what ever to fedora project ? And what about the community ? There more more 3rd party wiki pages, news sites, *RPM REPOSITORIES*, support forums and what not than there was ever provided by Redhat alone..

And you say that support has gone worse because "they dont want to support the serious users"..

So, honest question, could you actually give some real facts how things are worse now than they where ?

Re:Linux Wars?

[biquet]

Beware, parent is myminicity.

Re:Please be serious

[dwater]

I prefer apt, but yum isn't so bad.

...and the smart package manager works on both, iinm. I prefer using it, but that's probably because I don't have to switch when I'm using one or the other.

Re:Please be serious

[MSG]

How can Fedora be a "serious threat" to Ubuntu when according to well known facts, the Fedora platform is a testing ground for RedHat and will always be?

That's not a fact, it's a characterization. It's not a particularly good one, either. Stability is, in fact, important to the Fedora developers, because they're users too. Slashdot did an interview [slashdot.org] with Max Spevack, the Fedora Project leader a while back. His answers, particularly to question #8, are relevant to your assertion.

Quoted: Fedora is the best of what works today. RHEL is the best of what will work for the next seven years.

Fedora isn't going to be the latest beta of stuff that doesn't work. The people who tell you that are advancing a political agenda.

Has yum improved that much to match apt?

It's likely that you know a great deal more than I do about apt, so you should correct me if I'm wrong about this:

While yum is slower than apt to resolve dependencies, I think it's a much more useful tool. apt can install a package if you know its name. Yum can install a local package, and get its dependencies. It can also install a package based on its name, a virtual capability, an actual capability (library name or executable), or a file provided by the package (by path).

Yes, yum is a little slow, but in exchange it is capable of better doing what I want it to, as a user. I think it's better than apt. As a Fedora user, I have the option to use either one, and I stick with yum.

Re:Linux Wars?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how Ubuntu is given 'credit' for codec buddy. Who wrote codec buddy? Bastien Nocera who works for Red Hat and Thomas Vander Stichele who works for Fluendo (you know, the guys who want your soul so you can play mp3's)

Red Hat pays someone's salary to write codec buddy and yet 'ubuntu' comes out the better. Sounds like NetworkManager all over again. Red Hat pays to write the code the fanboys think ubuntu is the greatest thing ever....

Re:Umm, no.

[chosechu]

RPM is probably a better packaging mechanism than deb.
No doubt yum has more or less the same intelligence as apt when it comes to upgrading a machine.

The real difference comes from the repositories. RPM-based repositories are strictly bound to a unique binary distribution (RedHat 8 or 9 or SuSE 10 or 11), so they gravitate around the same set of basic packages and have trivial dependency descriptions, e.g. you want gnome, you get evolution. APT-based repositories are not bound to any single version of Debian, you can fetch a 2-year old Debian installation CD and run an upgrade to the latest and brightest using a reliable connection. This implies having much more detailed dependency descriptions for each package, like: this package requires a mail user agent, a database client, library X version 1.2 or higher, and library Y version 2.2 (strict).

To build such a repository requires a huge amount of manpower, which Debian draws from the mass of its contributors (thousands). Each package maintainer takes greatest care of maintaining correct and usable dependency descriptions, abusive or incomplete dependencies are treated as bugs. RedHat cannot fight these numbers: how many people are working on maintaining their repository stability and consistency?

If RedHat wants to improve their repositories and get closer to Debian quality, they have to destroy the boundaries between successive distributions and make the transition continuous. This implies in turn having much more fine-grained dependency descriptions between packages. Repositories get more reliable, the RPM upgrade nightmare disappears and yum looks just as smart as apt.

PC?

[websitebroke]

Joe Sixpack calls a computer with Windoze installed a PC, and he calles a computer with OSX installed a Mac. Dumb, but this is how it is.

Just switched from Fedore to Ubuntu

[flajann]

Having been a long-time Fedora user, I just switched to Ubuntu as my platform choice for development. Now, my particular development environment does have some dependency on the Fedora directory structure, but this was easy enough to work around on Ubuntu.

The thing I like about Ubuntu is that much of the software I had to hand-compile under Fedora is available with full functionality via apt-get on Ubuntu. Very nice. I don't know if Fedora 8 fixed this annoyance because I made the switch as F8 was released.

Ultimately, I muck about with the distro so much it doesn't really matter to me all that much anymore where it comes from.

One pet peeve for both Ubuntu and Fedora is the lack of support for having multiple monitors in a way that is easily configurable. I had to muck about directly with xorg.conf on Ubuntu as much as I had to do under Fedora to get all 3 of my monitors to come up properly! Come on, guys! This is a no-brainer on Windows and the Mac. Why is this still a pain under Linux???

Overall, I like Ubuntu a bit better than Fedora at this point -- though another pet peeve is that their default desktop is Gnome and not KDE. A minor nit, but one I find pestering.

Re:2 why I stopped using I stopped using Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Apt beats yum hands down

Sorry, but nowadays YUM beats APT hands down :)

Fedora's 13 month Support Cycle

[gethoht]

While I've test driven the new fedora(8), and have found it to be by far the best fedora release to date, there is one fundamental problem I have with Fedora... the 13 month support cycle. I think to gain major acceptance on corporate desktops near and far, you have to have a long-term support cycle, ala Ubuntu LTS(or redhat, or suse enterprise). Also, if you're developing a product based off of a fedora release, what happens to your product when the release you've chosen goes out of support, and new bugfixes or updates are no longer applied to the distribution? If you released your code/product with say an Ubuntu LTS release, you know that you have up to 36 months of updates/bugfixes. To me it would make sense to develop code or a product that will be supported for a longer period.

As a sysadmin, it also makes alot more sense to roll out desktops of a product that will have long term support. I don't want to have to upgrade all the machines to a current release every 13 months.

All that being said. There are things that I love about fedora. I love how fedora handles automated installations(kickstart). I've had to install fedora with the same setup on several machines(all the same hardware), and the kickstart installations make that an absolute breeze. I like how SELinux is an option, as is a built in firewall. It's nice to see that emphasis on security.

As with every distro, Fedora has it's good and bad points, but the support cycle is the real dealbreaker for me.