Fedora Core May Be Reborn 92
darthcamaro writes "At the first ever Fedora Flock conference this past weekend, a proposal was put forward by developer Mat Miller to re-architect Fedora with a core distribution, surrounded by layers of additional functionality for desktop, server and cloud. It's a proposal that Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron is interested in too. 'How can we make Fedora be something that is modular enough to fit into all those different environments (device, desktop, server & cloud) , while still acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach isn't something that draws people into the project?' Bergeron said. 'People want something that is specifically for them.'"
I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where you want stability, well proven packages and long term maintenance.
Fedora is the cutting edge, better suited to an enthusiast desktop or maybe a development environment.
In the past I used Fedora for office and servers. That was an error. Switching to CentOS (which is Fedora stabilized) was a much better decision.
The exception was one case in which I needed a brand new subsystem - kernel plus userspace. For that, Fedora made sense because the brand new version I needed was not on RedHat / CentOS yet.
Re:Arch Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
But you wouldn't use those in an office/cloud environment, which is what I think the developers are thinking about.
i wouldnt? whoops...my bad. guess i should redo all the servers I have been running for the past 6 years
Gentoo and Arch don't have recognised large-scale support vendors, which is something many companies require. I would guess any work will be back-ported into a RedHat if something fruitful comes from this.
Re:What Fedora Needs... (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you even read the parent post? He said that RHEL/Cent OS lags too far behind. There needs to be a happy medium between the too unstable Fedora and the Jurassic RHEL/Cent OS. Good luck getting the stable version of chrome to run on Cent OS. The current release is so far behind that Google dropped support for it.
Start with a LTS distro (Score:5, Insightful)
Since 18 months updates is simply not enough.
Re:I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a lot of the traditional thinking about servers are changing: VM's, OS-containers, cloud computing means, that the traditional big iron, unchanging OS with hand crafted config files, is receding. Instead all the interesting stuff will happen in mass deployed auto configured VM's, or OS-containers (OpenVZ, LXC etc). There will be VPS's (Virtual Private Servers, served from the cloud), etc. etc.
With services doing live migrations across data centers, and services being configured and executed on a demand only basis, and everything interesting in fleeting VM's and containers, they need for long term feature stable servers may recede;
So while Fedora may not be everyone's choice for a bare metal VM and container server, it may very well be exactly what you want to put inside those VM's and containers. This is why it is important to rethink the Fedora distro. As it is now, its base install very much reflect old style UNIX thinking (nothing wrong with UNIX style, but such servers are not the whole story), that means the base install pulls in stuff like "ed", "tar", "file" etc. While they may nice little standard programs, they may not make sense in a custom VPS.
Re: I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:2, Insightful)
If Fedora "isn't stable enough for anything other then the desktop" then it's not stable enough for the desktop, either. I don't want free reboots on my desktop box while I'm trying to use it.