Fedora 14 Laughlin Released

Fedora arguably the best Linux Distro is out!

 

LOL "best".

 

whatever floats his boat

 

Is Fedora a less than optimal distro? I've been running Crunchbang Statler as of late and have never tried Fedora, but have been curious from time to time.

 

Fedora is the right choice if you care for Free Software and want a bleeding edge distribution. Like every distribution that comes with the latest software, there is always a higher risk of broken programs in comparison to rock solid distributions like RHEL or Debian stable. There is nothing wrong with Fedora if you're fine with that. It's roughly on the same level of stability like Ubuntu or Aptosid (formerly Sidux) and your way to go if you prefer an RPM-based distribution.

 

It's pretty much the Red Hat equivalent of Ubuntu ... Ubuntu is backed by commercial Connonical. Fedora is backed by commercial Red Hat.

I really need to switch to Fedora so I can get more familiar with the Red Hat based stuff. So far most of my Linux experience has been with Debian.

 

The relationship between RHEL and Fedora is more like the one between Solaris and OpenSolaris or SLES/D and OpenSuse.
The open variant is always ahead of the current commercial version, mainly for testing reasons.
Canonical has a different model. One could say that the current Ubuntu release is a testing version for the next LTS, but since LTS is a part of the usual release plan and available for everyone, this comparison is not accurate.

If you're just curious Fedora will be fine, but if you actually plan to learn something about RHEL, better try CentOS.

 

Fedora is cutting edge lastest packages, features and all and it is stable enough for day to day usage.
What is important is that unlike CentOS, Fedora runs on laptops fast out of box.
I just finished finalising it.
For users on Nvidia Graphics Adapters, you need to know someone @ Nvidia screwed up on the drivers, so you only get good performance on on nodoka GTK themes plus you need to install the legacy icon packages.
You need to switch to Nodoka GTK otherwise GNOME will be laggy and I hate the names of KDE so don't ask me why don't I switch to it.
Quite happy with the OS now.

Fedora is very good for development not system admins.

The issue with "Rock Solid" OS is that new hardware have issues running on it and the lack of newer advance features.

 

Here's an article about Fedora 14 at h-online.com (english version of heise.de (german slashdot counterpart)):
What's new in Fedora 14 - The H Open Source: News and Features

 

Oracle killed OpenSolaris :/ I work with Solaris quite a bit ... I'm getting more and more comfortable. I'm just not sure how many organizations run debian - pretty sure more large organizations use RHEL over Debian.

I've used CentOS but for some reason I just don't like it. Would probably make a nice minimal install for my netbook, though. Maybe when I get the time to do it I'll set it up on my server and run my netbook diskless from it. I've done the research on CentOS, it would be fairly easy to get that going on my netbook.

I really like openSUSE. I should give that a try again! Haven't touched it in almost two years now.

 

"Rock solid" distros are no fun. I run Arch with all bleeding edge packages and not once have experienced a bug or a crash.

 

From my experience, Fedora is much more stable than Sidux...at least it used to be.

 

libjpegturbo great for image surfing.
systemd replacement for upstart (not default but available).

 

I ran Sidux for more than 2 years on a computer that Debian stable couldn't handle ootb back then. Although being pretty much a beginner at that time I never had noteworthy problems. I used sxmi and always thought (and read) before I acted.