Fedora Core vs Ubuntu

What say gentlemen?

 

I switched away from Fedora Core 5 and to Kubuntu 6.06 because I got sick of normal system updates hosing the system. Further, Kubuntu is easier to deal with and since it's a more popular distro among home users, seems to have more support on forums and from software producers.

- Trip

 

My wireless card works out of the box in Ubuntu 7.04, no luck with Fedora.

 

I'm not gonna vote on this because I've never used Fedora.

I used Red Hat Linux when the company still cared about the market segment we could call "home users and small office". They had a distribution for enterprises and had a distribution that was more suited for people who did not need all the enterprise stuff. When Red Hat decided to concentrate on the enterprise, I stopped using Red Hat. They made it quite clear that they were interested in supporting enterprise clients. I felt that customers like me were no longer being heard by Red Hat. Admittedly, the segment I was in had never been their priority but with their decision to concentrate exclusively on selling to enterprises, I understood that I counted for nothing. I stopped using Red Hat before Fedora had a usable release.

So I went back to Debian, which I had used before using Red Hat. (The reason I moved to Red Hat in the first place was because they used it where I worked.) I stayed with Debian for about 4 years but I grew increasingly frustrated with their broken release schedule. Either you use their "stable" distribution which gets updated too infrequently (it's truly a joke), or you use their "unstable" distribution which is updated daily but then you have to be on guard to make sure you don't do an update that will break your system (yes, it happens every now and then). The distribution labeled "testing" is too risky to use because security holes can remain unpatched there for too long. ("Stable" gets patched because that's what people use in production, "unstable" gets patched because that's where all the new code gets in, including the patches, but there is no impetus to patching "testing".) Mixing "stable" with "unstable" is just as bad as using "unstable".

So this spring I moved to Ubuntu and I have not regretted it. It has a sensible release schedule and the people producing Ubuntu care about the market segment I'm in: the home user who first and foremost wants to get work done.

I've felt no desire to try Fedora.

 

Fedora's commitment to remain "pure" with only totally open source components in the distro is admirable, but it leads to a LOT of hardware that is only available as closed source not being supported.

Ubuntu's inclusion of their "restricted-drivers" package makes so much work out of the box that just doesn't in Fedora. No more fighting with madwifi or ndiswrapper to try and get my wireless running. I gave up on Fedora after one to many times having to totally reconfigure everything after an update.

I may look at Fedora again in the future, but for now Ubuntu suits me perfectly.

 

They each suit different users, and I find neither any better than the other. I use and enjoy both.

 

I can see where your coming at, but from my perspective Red Hat has an obligation to bring value to its shareholders. If they decided they had to focus on the enterprise to bring in money, then that is what they have to do. When they discontinued the "Red Hat Linux" in favor of RHEL, there really wasn't a Linux/Desktop market to begin with (Dell notwithsanting, is there really much of one now?). So if they didn't put more focus on the server side, they might not be around now to annoy people.

I still use Fedora since my company uses RH exclusively on the Linux side so maybe someone can enlighten me. What would Ubuntu today offer that is better/faster/easier than Fedora 7 (or FC6, which my laptop is using since I haven't had time to upgrade) or RHEL5 for that matter? For the record it's trivial to get the ATI Radeon and Intel 3945 drivers installed on my system so that is a non-factor for me.

Last time I really used Debian was Woody, I think. Maybe Sarge. So I'm a bit out of date with its derivatives.