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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."
I wouldn't consider one open-source project to be a danger to another...
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
when they gain back some serious users - specifically the ones they decided weren't important enough to continue to support.
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.
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Because it assumes the Ubuntu folks are seated idle and doing absolutely nothing.
As long as it uses RPM, it will never be a threat.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
In F/OSS environments we welcome alternatives and diversity.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
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.
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.
.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.
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
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
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.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.
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.
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".
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.
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/ 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.
While my professor swears by Fedora and I really tried to like it, it was just too much work for too little payout between releases. Same thing with Ubuntu. So while I'll always play with the new releases of various distros (like the latest Mandriva I have running in a VM on a Xandros host) the combination of built in Crossover Office(a lifesaver when you have to deal with an Intranet site that won't play nice with anything but IE5 or IE6) rock solid stability and everything just working out the box will keep me on Xandros Business for the foreseeable future.Now if they will only release an X64 version.
The really nice thing IMO about these "bleeding edge" distros is you can get a taste of the features that will end up in your distro of choice down the line. And unlike some posters who think we should have only one or two distros like Apple and Microsoft, I'm really glad that folks can choose what works for them. This way I can have my Xandros, you can have your Ubuntu,another can choose Fedora,etc. I think this wealth of choice makes it easier to find something more tailor made for the way you work, as opposed to the "one size fits all" approach of the big boys.
What I think we DO need is a website with a clear, easy to read list of features side-by-side of the different distros, along with a central hardware database so that it would be easier to compare the apps, features, and hardware support of the various distros to take some of the guesswork out of choosing. I know most folks won't have the patience to do as I did and go through 30+ installs before I luckily had a boxed set of Xandros Business literally dropped in my lap. Lucky for me Glenn was a die hard Suse man and just pitched the box to me when his sister got it as a present for him. But there needs to be an easier way to compare the feature lists and supported hardware to allow newcomers to find their "right fit" without having to try everything. That is my 2c on the subject, anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register