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Fedora Core May Be Reborn
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.'"
Hasn't Arch Linux already solved this problem (for at least x86)?
Hasn't Gentoo already solved this problem for [almost] all architectures?
Fedora isn't really targeted to those environments anyway.
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.
Fedora is all about being a testbed for new programs, new technology, new ideas. It's not about being stable, it never has been and it probably never will be. If you want a RedHat based distro with community support that's stable, you don't want Fedora, you want CentOS.
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Man, I am so sick of this 're-birth' crap from Fedora. I liked Fedora 'core' back 7+ years ago before we had to be this uber bleeding edge -slash- agile uber aggressive build cycle that fucks everything up and obsoletes distribution usage to about 6 months.
When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future, I was totally cool with that, and it melded nicely in a lot of environments. But that spin-off has become such a damn mess now with developer heavy ideas that, in some case, go against every foundation of a traditional UNIX-like operating system design, I could really give who shits what the do now.
Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything. You'll never get that right, and some 'next-in-line' guy they give 5 minutes of talk time at the next conference will say the same thing.
When you take shit, and try and re-invent it with only shit, I'm sure everyone knows the result you get.
With integrated secure boot and remote attestation Fedora is likely to be the *only* Linux distribution which can lawfully be used on the Internet in the coming years. It is important that they continue their good work if we are to have any Linux at all.
ah I believe ubuntu has its bootloader signed and did not the linux foundation have shim loader signed monthes ago?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Well i like GNOME 3 but the subsequent changes are way too much:
1. no dock, preferrably configurable one (left or right)
2. removing F3 from Nautilus
3. changing gvfs paths every 2nd relaease
4. moving menu options into the main title bar (like preferences in GNOME)
I've been using Fedora since the beginning but after F19 I am no longer recommending it to anyone.
Maybe things have changed but when I used Debian they had one stable release in like 5 years...if anyone farts around the fire it's that cluster fuck of Debian dudes.
I don't know what you are talking about. If you look at the release timeline offered by Wikipedia (which is always right) you can see that the longest gap between two releases was between woody and sarge. This was slightly less than three years, which is not unheard of with less rapid release distributions. All new releases since then has taken roughly two years each.
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.
Since 18 months updates is simply not enough.
Which is something Red Hat has a solution coming out for - I don't remember what it's called (not awake yet), but they're including optional repo for newer packages with RHEL 7.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future,
It was never that. It's the alpha test release for RHEL. It's not beta-quality, because there's a RHEL limited beta program. Fedora is Alpha-test-quality software. Why would you run that on your desktops? At least run CentOS.
Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything.
You are confusing OS and distribution. That's normal because it's kind of a fuzzy and wavy line, but it's somewhere between the kernel, basic userland, and basic libraries, and the full-fledged system. Debian is useful for installs ranging from very small to full desktop because the minimal system is sufficiently minimal. Fedora hopes to accomplish the same thing. It's a matter of dependencies, and not getting carried away with them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Man, I am so sick of this 're-birth' crap from Fedora. I liked Fedora 'core' back 7+ years ago before we had to be this uber bleeding edge -slash- agile uber aggressive build cycle that fucks everything up and obsoletes distribution usage to about 6 months.
When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future, I was totally cool with that, and it melded nicely in a lot of environments. But that spin-off has become such a damn mess now with developer heavy ideas that, in some case, go against every foundation of a traditional UNIX-like operating system design, I could really give who shits what the do now.
Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything. You'll never get that right, and some 'next-in-line' guy they give 5 minutes of talk time at the next conference will say the same thing.
When you take shit, and try and re-invent it with only shit, I'm sure everyone knows the result you get.
It's not surprising that you are confused here, since the original poster went out of his/her way to omit all of the substance of the proposal and instead focus on screaming "Fedora Core!". Of the three targets that were proposed, one of them (Fedora Server) is intended to be *exactly* what you just asked for. A clearly-defined server OS that is essentially snap-shots on the road to Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS stability. Then, there are two other targets: cloud images suitable for use in an IaaS or PaaS infrastructure and the Client Workstation which will be targeted at creators and IT specialists.
The whole point of this proposal is that many of us in the Fedora Project agree with you: One-size-fits-no-one isn't a lasting solution.
Furthermore, the original poster misrepresented two compatible-but-not-identical proposals that came up at Flock. The splitting of the target audiences into separate, isolated deliverables was actually my proposal (Stephen Gallagher), not Matthew's (though he and most of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee support it). The intent here is to have specific goals for sections of the Project and work towards meeting them. This is a large shift from Fedora's historical behavior which was to ship whatever the upstream projects shipped. With this proposal (backed by a design that is still in progress), we're going to make changes where they need to be made to produce a more cohesive whole.
In the end, we're working hard to ensure that Fedora is relevant in a changing age of cloud infrastructures and DevOps deployments, without ignoring our downstream RHEL and CentOS consumers as well. Certain other Linux OSes have decided to go the route of consumer electronics, but we as Fedora still believe that free software should be the infrastructure that powers those consumer products. And Fedora is a means to that end.
Stephen Gallagher (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee)
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
I run Fedora 19 with KDE on my home machines. Basically I set aside about 5 to 6 hours every six months to upgrade and when I say upgrade I mean a complete re-installation of the latest Fedora from DVD. Even though I actually backup my data (over 1TB) progressively I have never had to recover my data since I use LVM to manage my disks and all I have to do is make sure the system volumes including swap and of course the /boot partition are sized properly. Actually the only time I did have to recover my data when I converted the file-system from ext3 to ext4 and IMHO the performance improvement was worth it.
I strongly recommend that you try upgrading with 'fedup' next time around. It's far-and-away better than our historical upgrade processes and works in-place. I've personally gone from F17->F18->F19 using it with no ill effects.
I have actually found Fedora from 10 onward have been remarkably stable although I will admit when KDE 4.0 came out (I think that was with Fedora 15) I actually switched to Gnome util they fixed the stability issues, however that was not a Fedora issue.
Would I recommend Fedora for the Enterprise? Hell no! since you want any enterprise solution to be supported and in large corporations this usually means a Microsoft OS (this is changing but slowly) for the desktop and a mix of Linux (in my experience Redhat), Microsoft and Unix for the server room.
That's going to depend on your definition of Enterprise. Would I recommend Fedora today as your long-term FreeIPA or other core infrastructure server? No, probably not. On the other hand, would I recommend it for DevOps and rapidly deployed-used-and-killed VM instances for newer technologies such as Ruby on Rails or Node.js? Absolutely. Fedora's rapid development cycle is much more in line with those DevOps behaviors. It's actually a myth that "Fedora isn't for production". I know a great many DevOps deployments using Fedora successfully.
That all said, the major piece that was missing from this incredibly (and clearly intentionally) misleading summary is that the purpose of splitting off Fedora into three targets is to provide better support for those who want to use Fedora in production (the cloud image), those who want to develop their layered software so that it will run on the next version of RHEL/CentOS (the server) and people who want a comprehensive desktop for getting stuff done (the workstation/client).
Stephen Gallagher (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee)
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.