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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.
Because it assumes the Ubuntu folks are seated idle and doing absolutely nothing.
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.
...When are we going to stop seeing distros as opposing forces and stop accepting that it might be nice to have more than one popular distro? SPOILERS: Your favorite distro isn't the best.
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.
It's going to take more to "beat" Ubuntu than just having someone say "this is going to beat Ubuntu." There's more to Ubuntu than just what's on the disc. Since Fedora 8 is really just the beta version of Red Hat "Global" Desktop, all I'm really hearing here is "me too." Ok, so they prettied up the screens and added some more configuration options? Great. What happens when Fedora 9 comes out? Will I just be able to push a button and seamlessly upgrade the whole thing in place? I doubt it. And what happens if I decide I want paid support? Will Red Hat support my free Fedora download the way Canonical will support Ubuntu? No, they'll insist that I run "Red Hat Enterprise" for that. And where are the free Fedora discs being mailed to anyone who wants, just for the asking?
Ubuntu nailed the winning formula for desktop Linux, just like Red Hat seems to have nailed the winning formula for enterprise Linux. I wouldn't use either one in the other's place.
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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.
And things have changed how exactly from days of when redhat was redhat and there was no fedora? Gone worse ?
.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..
Seriously. How many redhat releases there where ? 9 majors if i remember right and few
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 ?
yush
..open source.
Media tactic, competitive tactics, licensing manipulation tactics, etc..
As both projects are open source, as are many others, they all can use the best of any of these.
But in open source it all really comes down to a sum of humanities produced value.
Selecting "ubuntu" as a lable for a linux distribution is in recognition of this.
And of course it doesn't make Ubuntu the best by just naming it this way, but it does point out a recognition of what makes things "best".
There are so many tactic that work outside of open source, but open source is doesn't fix in supporting those tactics.
However, because of this non-fit, you can always identify an outsiders attempt to apply such tactics.
The different distributions of linux, the value is no so much in competition of the same general user system but in specialization.
Its good we have an overall target of improving desktop and server systems, but the time has come when this flushes out that such system are similiar enough that there is little difference if any thing more than a distro name.
When the magazine industry first started there was a target of general interest publication and at some point when this was filled competition lead to the beginnings of specialization. Today we have magazines that specialize in more things that only a few are aware of them all. The same is beginning to happen with open source OS packages. Multimedia distros like dynebolic, artistx, studio64 etc.. and there are others. What the specialization provides is better integration of specialized packages, kernel tuning, etc...
Specialization is where open source competition is and also where there are fewer competing, if more than one.
They can both package up the latest software, Yum is nearly as good as apt as far as I can tell. They both offer GNOME and . . Firefox.
I mean what noticeable difference is there?
In the end, what lasting advantage can one have over the other if they both have access to the same range of open source components?
I have used the latest Fedora 8 and Ubuntu and I can't get excited about either of them. Pulseaudio was and is an utter pain in the neck to get working with Enemy Territory, Skype and Firefox all needing different workarounds and what is so astounding about it from a user's point of view? After the effort, stuff works like it did except that Youtube videos now randomly cause Firefox to crash.
There's nothing happening in user interfaces - they are stagnating and Fedora 6,7,8 and Gutsy Gibbon all seem the same to me from that point of view. The new 3D effects cause reliability problems and do only a little bit more than nothing for usability.
There's a lot of "lets-learn-programming-by-implementing-what-others-have-done-before" going on but not a lot of innovation.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I don't know. Personally I think they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I have switched to Ubuntu (not LTS) and have had only one technical problem with the distribution, which was fixed with the next apt-get upgrade. With Fedora I always had the impression I was working with something broken. The other thing I like about Ubuntu is it's lite install especially with server. Fedora is just too bloated even on a minimal install. Fedora does give someone a cheap way of learning Red Hat's distribution even though certain features are not in RHEL yet. It has been a few releases, since I have used Fedora, so objectively I need to try it out again. The one think I do like about Fedora is their documentation organization. In contrast, I find Ubuntu's documentation to be here there and everywhere.
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".
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?
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.
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
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 of us? People who only know English are a distinct minority.
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.
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.
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.
I just love it when people get angry at/about RedHat without realizing that without RedHat, Linux would not be where it is today. It has been the foremost corporate contributor to Linux and Linux on the desktop by far. It has also proven to the market that there is a viable business model selling Linux and Linux services. Without that, it'd be doubtful that as many corps and organizations would not have adopted Linux. Some people seem to think that if there were no evil Linux corps, Linux would be better. Well, this isn't 1992 anymore. Weekend coders can't produce a fully-functional OS and software stack with QA and performance factored in. Linux would be NOWHERE without the corporations that have hired many people to work full time on Linux projects. RedHat is the chief among these. BTW, I'm agreeing with you, but just adding some more points.
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.
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.
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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.
Like the old margerine ad claiming "there is no difference" this piece reads like an ad. I would hesitate to put any stock in it for a number of reasons. Having installed and configured both I cannot see how Fedora 8 is anything but YARHR (yet another red hat release) i.e., bumping the version as "development theater" with ittle actual improvement. There's little difference bttn F8 and F7 much less any of the earlier releases.
Since installation is similar (though the Ubuntu "live" CD allows for better hardware driver validation), the first thing to compare is the gui package front-ends. Both are good but Synaptic is better than Yumex, far better in actual use. It is intuitive for those who are not Linux gurus where Yumex is not. Deb packages also tend to have fewer dependencies and there are more of them. Firefox3 for example, was available to Ubuntu users first.
Second most important item is the kernel, mainly the wireless drivers. Ubuntu wins here, particularly on laptops and older hardware. Example: adding a wep key. Click and paste in Ubuntu where it's easier to edit the poorly documented text files in Fedora.
One of my pet peeves is default security. Run 'netstat -anp' on a newly installed RH box and you'll be shocked to see how much is running and listening for network connections. Big difference from Ubuntu where you will likely see a much smaller process table and only ports 22 (ssh) and 68 (dhcp) open to the world.
Otherwise both have their high and low points. The big downer is the stuff that gets "deprecated" and made incompatible with previous release for no good reason. This is mostly GNU's fault to be sure. Sometimes I think they break stuff just to differentiate Linux from Unix. I really dislike Linux upgrades because so much breaks, far more than in a BSD, IBM, and Sun OS upgrades. Rewriting shell scripts to account for parameter differences that have no evident rational gets old after the 4th or 5th time (say "nslookup has been deprecated" three times fast, but wait, now it's been un-deprecated, ah but the output format has been changed, again...). But I digress, and am grateful to all FOSS coders, especially those who don't make work difficult for those of us who install, upgrade, and manage their systems.
Not really sure why RedHat is allowing its distribution to fall so far behind. I suppose they're fat and happy to get paid for RHEL support, RHEL bugfixes, and RHEL repos. Like SCO before them, IMO, it's a short-term business model that won't hold up to Debian's community process much longer.
The would be linux n00b would be better off asking 'which distribution is most popular' rather than 'which distribution is best', then going with the most popular. Chances are that's the major distribution which is easiest to use and which has a large user base (lots of online help/forums if needed). Asking 'which is best' just opens the can of worms you refer to regarding choice, as some who answer will advocate for whatever it is they like, while others will answer fairly, if unhelpfully, 'there is no best distribution, it depends on what you want, yadda, yadda, yadda'.
Personally, I think the abundance of choice with Linux distributions is a good thing, and something Linux users with at least some experience may find interesting to explore. But it can be bewildering to the potential new user, especially if they make the mistake of asking which is best.
Loose lips lose spit.
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.
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