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."

Linux Wars?

[ThePromenader]

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

Wake me up....

[nighty5]

when they gain back some serious users - specifically the ones they decided weren't important enough to continue to support.

Please be serious

[bogaboga]

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?

The Ubuntu zealots are also very vocal and defend the Debian apt system from which Ubuntu gets its package manager. Has yum improved that much to match apt? I doubt.

Issues with the article already.

[palegray.net]

Lately, I have been looking into other distributions that, like Ubuntu, are working to make strides to attract new users. I still have Debian Etch burned to a CD, waiting for a test in our lab. Next up is going to be Fedora.

(emphasis mine) I'm supposed to take this reviewer seriously, when he hasn't got around to testing Debian Etch but wants me to trust his knowledge of Linux systems, including Ubuntu? Right.

Posting from an Ubuntu 64 workstation, running several Debian Etch VPS containers in VMWare Server, and a couple of dedicated Debian and FreeBSD boxes on this LAN.

This article is misleading

[bogaboga]

...Misleading. Why?

Because it assumes the Ubuntu folks are seated idle and doing absolutely nothing.

Umm, no.

[B5_geek]

As long as it uses RPM, it will never be a threat.

I object to the word "threat".

[A beautiful mind]

In F/OSS environments we welcome alternatives and diversity.

They are the Same

[ArkiMage]

I've installed both on the same machine within the past 2 weeks. Once the desktop is up and I'm clicking around it would be very difficult to tell which OS is running on the box except for the backdrop and default color scheme. Gnome 2.20 is pretty much Gnome 2.20 no matter which distro it sits on top of. Icon placement, desktop panels, menu arrangement, they were pretty much identical. Who cares about apt vs yum either, click Applications->Add/Remove Software and point'n'click your way through installing whatever you need installed.

There is no "war" between distros. I can run Firefox on any Linux distro. Same goes for Amarok, K3B, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, etc...

Get over it.

Re:fedora is an upgrade treadmill

[Wdomburg]

Install Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS and you're covered 7 years for both desktop and server. Fedora, like regular Ubuntu releases, are focused on features rather than longevity. The releases are just branched and branded differently rather than being done inline like Ubuntu. I prefer the Red Hat model, since they start with a feature set frozen from an established release rather than doing a new release with new features. I trust a "dot zero" release of RHEL/CentOS far more than I trust a "dot zero" version of Ubuntu LTS.

Who cares?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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.

It's weird that having worked with packages, you confuse the package format (RPM/DEB) with the package manager (APT/YUM). The main reason why ubuntu rocks is APT, not the .deb format. I still have to see a package manager that beats APT in practice (and that includes commercial systems - and it's not that APT cannot improved...). Why the RPM people went with yum instead of using (or modifying) a proved solution is beyond me.

Re:Linux Wars?

[nine-times]

That's pretty much what I came in here to say.

Why does the most recent Fedora seem so competitive to Ubuntu? Well probably because they're pulling their updates from a lot of the same places.

But if you want to imagine the two groups fighting it out, go right ahead. Insofar as they are competing, there's only one possible winner: us. Each group is trying to improve Linux more, each will feed off of the other's improvements, and the end result will be a better FOSS operating system that will be accessible to all of us.

Good luck to both of them.

Divide and Conquer.

[Fantastic Lad]

The attitude of Coke vs Pepsi and Democrat vs Republican doesn't sit well with Open Source.

Not every darned scenario in the world must resolve to some sort of Darwinian competition. Sometimes people just like to create at the peek of their powers for the sheer joy of creating something amazing, and not because they feel the need to destroy the competition. Ask the best painters, musicians and writers if their best work came about because they felt threatened --or if they felt in love with their medium and with the world in general. --Or rather, if you are a coder, how was the best code you ever wrote generated? Were you wearing your Nikes or were you just obsessively having fun trying to solve a problem?

The ideas of Darwinism and Competition certainly hold validity, but they are also two of the most highly abused concepts ever invented. Sheesh, the whole 'final solution' thing was based on Darwin. Talk about an abuse of concept!

-FL

yum Is Solid

[EXTomar]

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?

The Ubuntu zealots are also very vocal and defend the Debian apt system from which Ubuntu gets its package manager. Has yum improved that much to match apt? I doubt.

Why is it bad that Fedora is backed by Red Hat? Why do you even ask "Has yum improved?" when you admit you don't know (or care) about the answer. Asking "How can Fedora be good if it is backed by Red Hat?" and "Has yum improved?" are both empty questions meant to cast both into a bad light instead of offering some insight instead of investigating the issue. I honestly never understood why people don't like "yum" but like "apt" when they seem to match each other feature for feature. There maybe something deep down that one does that the other doesn't but at a high level: "# yum install firefox" and "# apt-get install firefox" are equivalent.

Beyond this, I really don't see why Ubuntu or Fedora need to "beat" each other. We should be celebrating the difference in strengths and the choice. I'm never convinced by fanboys on any side who think everyone needs to their favorite distro.

Truly awful article - reviewed before installation

[Animats]

Now this is a truly awful article. The article isn't a review of Fedora 8. It's someone blithering that they're going to do a review of Fedora 8. This is a review of the press release.

The author has trouble with English, HTML, and the concept of free software. If you think the text is painful, try "view source". The page was apparently generated with Microsoft FrontPage, then hacked by hand. Badly. There's code from at least five sources, some of it in Visual Basic.

Notice the link right after the article: "Click here for prices on Linux distributions".

Re:Linux Wars?

[gollito]

Isn't a Mac/Apple a P(ersonal)C(computer)?

Back in the day you could make the distinction between Mac's and IBM compatibles by their hardware platform but even then they were still Personal Computers.
There was of course the distinction between hardware (PPC vrs x86) but even that is gone now.

Re:Linux Wars?

[JavaBear]

I agree, though the added competition can only be of the good.

Re:Umm, no.

[satoshi1]

Personally I find rpm vastly superior to any any MS Windows program installation procedure.
And so is DEB! In the end, isn't that all that matters?

Re:Umm, no.

[Peter H.S.]

but I find the debian repos have an awful lot of awesome in them. They have crypto sigs that cover md5/sha1 and sha256 hashes and the sigs describe the whole dang repository efficiently. Does yum have that? I literally don't know, but I doubt it.

Fedora rpms are gpg signed a vastly more secure option than md5/sha1. Even the public keys for verifying the packages are managed by yum/rpm. AFAIK RH/Fedora used package signing long before Debian did.

Why? Probably because they abandoned me and I just don't expect much. Also *BEEP* redhat. I mean that very sincerely.

Get over it; how on earth did you expect RH to survive by selling updates for 40 dollars a year (or whatever the RH update program used to cost.) And they never abandonend you, they just changed their Linux distro from being a corporate product to a community product with free updates. Yes the transition sucked but it was necessary, and it has turned out to be a benefit for users like me who prefer KDE to the Gnome desktop that the user community has more influence on the distro.

RH has always been one of the most active Linux supporters, pouring both money and manpower in projects like ext3, gcc, lvm, selinux and the kernel itself, projects that benefits every Linux distro out there. The money for all these software engineers comes from the corporations that buy the expensive support contracts and licenses.

RH should also get some respect from the fact that they always, without wavering, have been avid gpl/FLOSS supporters.

--
Regards

Re:Linux Wars? It's a matter of choice!

[mrsteveman1]

Choice is a good thing, but I would say excessive choice with little benefit is a problem. Open source software means one choice is an infinite number of choices because you can change whatever you want, no one is forcing you to do anything. Multiple distros, each with their own separate versions of Gnome and KDE, each using different config panels and menu systems. It's a problem.

If there was at least a baseline common platform for things like apps, drivers, config panels, menu systems, look and feel etc, it wouldn't matter, but every one of them change these things constantly. It doesn't surprise me that mainstream users aren't flocking to Linux on the desktop, its a mess.

Re:Linux Wars?

[remitaylor]

Danger is my middle name.

Some projects come along and "kill off" their open-source "competitors," surpassing them in functionality or ease-of-use or ... whatever. So there is a bit of a sense of danger.

This is a good and healthy thing. Projects benefit from competitiveness, just like businesses do.

I, for one, am exceptionally happy to hear this. I'm a very happy Ubuntu user, on the desktop and server, but I've been waiting for an excuse to use and support another distro for awhile, if for no other reason than to learn it.

IMHO, a lot of the improvements to desktop linux over the past few years have come from trying to clone (or show up!) the functionality in OSX and Vista. I think linux has done a good job showing up OSX and Vista in terms of 3D effects and whatnot, so ... now what? It'll be another 10-15 years til Microsoft releases another Windows, if it'll be anything like Vista. We need competition, even if its not driven by the normal market forces (like sales), to drive innovation.

I'm happy to see more competition between linux distros, specifically directed at Ubuntu, who's been king of the mountain for too long, I say! It's about time for another distro to step up to the challenge of knocking Ubuntu off its mountain!

( ^ tongue sharply in cheek )

Why is parent "Flamebait?"

[houstonbofh]

Most people out there just want something that works, and don't care to ever know how or why. Reseller Advocate http://www.reselleradvocate.com/ [reselleradvocate.com] is a trade mag for (duh) Resellers. Last month, the "What Matters" column was "Stuff that Works." It was all about the non-workability of Vista contrasted with the workability of XP. Even Linux was mentioned (which is rare for that mag...) but with the phrase "Would it give Linux a chance to displace Windows?" The last line of the article is A quote of what is needed in the reseller industry. "Look, our top three OS choices get at least 20% higher 'it just works' score than the new Windows." This is really where Linux needs to look... People that don't care how, just that it works. That is most of the vendors, and most of the customers, weather we like it or not.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Linux Wars? It's a matter of choice!

[JohnBailey]

I agree. We should be all happy because we actually have freedom on what distro to choose.

I personally don't like this kind of news fomenting wars between opensource projects.

What war? It's just friendly rivalry. If one distro gets a few lines of coverage, no big deal. Next time some other distro will. The only ones who get upset are the rampant fanboys, who kind of embarrass the rest of us anyway.

Re:Who cares?

[siride]

I'm sorry, but RPM is the standard, not APT/DEB. It may have come along earlier, but that's water under the bridge now. And yes, I am aware of the distinction between package manager and package format. I should have said YUM/RPM instead of just RPM. Both are light-years ahead of APT/DEB. Looking at the man-page for APT scared me as I found that a number of searching and installation options I had grown accustomed to with YUM were not possible at all.

Re:Linux Wars?

[The Anarchist Avenge]

Wow man, seems like the mods don't understand sarcasm. That sucks that you got down-modded for that.

Re:yum Is Solid

[jaydonnell]

"but the lower level is important."

This is the under statement of the year ;)

Re:fedora is an upgrade treadmill

[SigmundFloyd]

Ubuntu has the LTS releases, but honestly, who doesn't upgrade when the next Ubuntu comes out

I don't. I'm happily running 6.10 and I'll upgrade when the next LTS release comes out. Actually, even then I'll wait a couple of months just to make sure there aren't problems with it. I couldn't care less about the "bleeding edge" and I've got better things to do than install, tweak, upgrade, tweak, test, tweak, reinstall, tweak, etc. I do security upgrades to single packages when needed, and that's it.

especially since they refuse to backport newer versions of software to older versions of Ubuntu

Not true...

Re:Linux Wars? It's a matter of choice!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confused in a lot of cases.

If there was at least a baseline common platform for things like apps, drivers, config panels, menu systems, look and feel

apps - GNOME or KDE. And you can also have BOTH
drivers - On Linux distros, Linux drivers are the only possibility. No choice there really.
config panels - GNOME or KDE
menu systems - GNOME or KDE
look and feel - GNOME or KDE

When it comes to "Windows replacement" or "Mac replacement" technologies, there is really only two choices currently: GNOME or KDE.

And that is a good thing, as they keep each other on their toes. Now, there are an infinite number of choices, if you know where to look. But most people only have to choose between GNOME or KDE. Look at all the main, user friendly distros.

Linux on the desktop is a mess? That's true, but compared to Windows they look pretty damn organized. Can you say "SPYWARE?" However, on Windows this type of malady is accepted as a part of life, which doesn't have to be the case.

Re:PC?

[nebosuke]

This distinction entered the common vernacular when IBM briefly held the trademark on the term "personal computer".

Every older programmer that I've met still uses the term that way. That usage was also pervasive when I got my first computer as a kid in the 80s, so I still use it that way through force of habit. The Apple switch campaign and pc/mac commercials also continue to make the distinction 'pc' vs. 'mac'.

It's 'dumb' in that the distinction is meaningless in the sense that macs are technically 'personal computers', but 'PC', as with many other terms, has additional connotations to a certain segment of the population which makes this usage both meaningful and correct.

Re:PulseAudio

[poopingman]

Seriously, what the hell are these Linux vendors thinking? It's not 1994, we don't need another laggy, buggy, soundcard hogging sound server! The first thing I do when installing a new distribution is make sure that both ESD and Arts will never run.

ALSA supports sound devices with hardware mixing and it supports transparent software mixing for devices without. All this stupid sound server will do is make it more difficult to get sound working properly with 3rd party applications. My favorite quote is from the Fedora Wiki regarding this topic (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio [fedoraproject.org]):

I fear every single OSS-using package needs to patched to replace the actual binary by a shell script that runs the real binary through padsp.

That alone should send off alarm bells in the developers' heads. This is a BAD idea. At least the KDE devs have it right. They are dropping Arts from KDE 4. I hope it's only Gnome users that will have to deal with a braindead sound server.... again.

Re:Linux Wars?

[xenocide2]

PackageKit (slated for Fedora 9 it seems) and codecBuddy are based on the ideas first implemented in Ubuntu under the spec Easy Codec Installation [launchpad.net], intended to generalize the idea. Redhat does great work, no doubt. ConsoleKit, Network Manager, etc, and I hope they can fix up Network Manager to have system-wide, user independent connection settings.

But lets not just up and declare that Ubuntu just steals credit. I don't think anyone is saying that Ubuntu wrote codec Buddy, but the features are similar enough.

Re:PC?

[petermgreen]

Afiact it is quite normal for acronyms to take on a meaning more specific than the words they stand for. HTML reffers specifically to the particular hypertext markup language used on the world wide web not to the concept of hypertext markup languages in general. CSS and XML similarlly. FTP reffers not to the general concept of a file transfer protocol but to one specific file transfer protocol and so on.

The ms winhlp source format (the old one before they went over to html) could be considered a markup language for hypertext but it is not HTML. Similarlly a mac can be considered a personal computer but it is not a PC.

Re:Linux Wars?

[obeythefist]

Threat to Microsoft? Shouldn't think so.

If people don't want to upgrade from XP to Vista because of application compatibility concerns, I can't see them dumping XP for Linux.

Look at it from the layman XP users perspective. Take the full set of applications they use from day to day.

How many of those will work on Vista? How many of those will work on Linux?

What is the difficulty curve in terms of setting up the apps? How long will it take? For apps that won't work on Vista or Linux, what are the alternatives? How hard are they to set up and use?

How long does the process take to switch? Including backups and application installs? Is it a significant amount of time? Are the rewards so great that it makes dumping XP worthwhile?

Compare all the benefits to the benefits of doing nothing and remaining with XP.

Windows XP remains Linux's biggest hurdle. Amusingly, it's also Microsoft's biggest hurdle.

What will kill Windows is the day I can download any Windows installer exe (packaged in MSI, InstallShield, WISE, whatever), doubleclick it, install it and run it on Linux and having it just work.

Re:Who cares?

[siride]

You can't throw a list of podunk Debian-based distros that three people use and expect me to take that seriously. Ubuntu is the ONLY commercially-supported, widely-used distro that uses APT. Every other distro in that category uses RPM: SuSE, RedHat/Fedora/CentOS (see, I'm even being fair and lumping them together as one distro), Mandriva. It's also the format specified by the LSB. For better or worse, a standard will emerge and I can assure you that DEB won't be it. Eventually Ubuntu will switch to RPM like it should and then Linux can finally make sense when it comes to package management.