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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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.