Fedora

[Rhisiart]

Originally Posted by fryke

I'm still interested, rhisiart: Do you have more specific questions?

When I visited southern India in 2004, MS ruled the roost. Very few people I met used Apple products and virtually none were familiar with Linux.

I was therefore surprised to meet a guy in Chennai (now a a good friend) who was a Unix aficionado. He now praises Fedora, as he is a keen advocate of open source software.

I have noticed over the last two years the growth and quality of open source products and wonder whether there is any need anymore for MS/Apple's tight grip on operating systems, complete with in-house software apps.

I just like MacOS stability.

I also like security.

I suspect that I do not have enough know-how to install a system that I will need to handle with confidence.

"There's lies the rub", as Shakespeare would say.

P.S. Edited using Bean

[PGTips]

Most modern Linux distributions do a fairly good task of hiding the user from the command line. Of all the distributions, I think Fedora does that best as it has a GUI tool for everything.

Linux is taking off in a big way in many developing countries, and it's no big surprise really.

[Decade]

The Linux distributions generally promote a different way of looking at programs.

Basically, there are 2 types of stability. There's code stability, that a particular way of doing things will continue to work for a long time, and there's running stability, that a program will be operating without errors.

Traditional software, like what Apple and Microsoft support, do code stability. They trade away flexibility and corporate responsiveness for the ability to compile once and sell your program to a lot of people. There are some Linux distributions that promise similar stability, and get supported by traditional companies like Oracle, but then your platform is not "Linux" but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" or "Ubuntu LTS." You get most of the code stability benefits of RHEL without the support contract by going with CentOS, I guess.

People tend to like the flashy, and open-source developers frequently mix bug fixes with new features, so things like Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 7.04 get all the attention. Software and hardware that used to work might not work anymore, but what does work is likely to work better than the long-term releases. Except that it's more likely for buggy updates to get through, like what happened with Ubuntu 6.10.

Personally, I prefer the Debian style of upgrades to the Red Hat style, so I'm more likely to try Ubuntu than Fedora. I also have a bit more trust in the OSS community's response to bugs than in Apple or Microsoft. Except for specific programs like PHP. For my personal systems, I don't need to be bothered by the minutiae of finding all the fixes to problems, as long as the community is taking care of it and the updater is working.

[ScottW]

Originally Posted by PGTips

Most modern Linux distributions do a fairly good task of hiding the user from the command line. Of all the distributions, I think Fedora does that best as it has a GUI tool for everything.

Linux is taking off in a big way in many developing countries, and it's no big surprise really.

Linux provides a GUI?

What is that? I think I'll stick with the command line. As a Mac user, I find Linux GUI's to be a poor implementation of Windows and considering Windows is a poor implementation of the Mac OS, we are a long ways from home in Linux GUI.

[fryke]

If all you need it for is _services_, i.e. you want apache, some mail & ftp server running etc., the command line certainly is "good enough" (or even better) for most tasks. (And you don't even need a monitor on that box for that.)

[ScottW]

Monitor on a Linux box? What is a monitor?

[nixgeek]

GNU Screen FTW!

[ebykm]

hmmm, Yellow Dog is based on Fedora core, you might wanna try out that.