# Fedora



## Rhisiart (Jun 10, 2007)

Has anyone tried Red Hat's Fedora OS?


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## fryke (Jun 10, 2007)

years ago, yes.


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## Rhisiart (Jun 10, 2007)

fryke said:


> years ago, yes.


What are your views on its stability?


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## fryke (Jun 10, 2007)

Generally, Fedora is a distro that tries to incorporate the newest and greatest at the _cost_ of some stability. On the other hand, new doesn't _necessarily_ have to mean less stable. Are you looking for something specific in opinions?


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## nixgeek (Jun 10, 2007)

Incidentally, Fedora 7 was released a few weeks ago.  I'm more of a Debian/Slackware/Ubuntu fan, but I might check this out for the heck of it.


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## PGTips (Jun 10, 2007)

I'm a Debian fan. I've Tested Fedora up until version 4. My biggest gripe was with the "yum" package manager, the way it seemed to hang the computer whenever it queried packages, and the insane amount of network access it required just to operate.

Apparently things have changed a lot in Core 7, like improvements to the boot up time, and also to yum. However, I have yet to give it a go, since I'm nice and cosy with Ubuntu. Why fix something that ain't broken?


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## fryke (Jun 10, 2007)

"Why fix something that ain't broken?" - is an often quoted question. Of course there _are_ reasons that would justify to "fix" it. For example, if another system offers features that are just not available for the one you're using. That, of course, is not really the case here, I'd say.
I'm still interested, rhisiart: Do you have more specific questions?


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## ScottW (Jun 10, 2007)

I used to be a RedHat when it was free. Then I went with Fedora, but with the advent of CentOS, I have put away with Fedora because of it's aggressive release schedule. 

I use CentOS on almost all servers I manage, and I have been happy with it. I highly recommend it. If you don't have the ability to go CentOS, Fedora would be my second solution.


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## Rhisiart (Jun 10, 2007)

fryke said:


> 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


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## PGTips (Jun 11, 2007)

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.


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## Decade (Jun 11, 2007)

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.


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## ScottW (Jun 11, 2007)

PGTips said:


> 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.


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## fryke (Jun 11, 2007)

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.)


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## ScottW (Jun 11, 2007)

Monitor on a Linux box? What is a monitor?


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## nixgeek (Jun 11, 2007)

GNU Screen FTW!


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## ebykm (Jun 12, 2007)

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


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## bluedevils (Jun 12, 2007)

I ran away from redhat when the free dist went to fedora.  I wasn't a fan of rpm.

I like ubuntu/kubuntu, but upgrading from dapper to edgy to feisty should be easier than it is now.

I'm comfortable with command line, so gentoo is my preferred linux OS if you have the horsepower.  It compiles everything to your specific setup.

OSX is just the most "fire and forget" OS and it still has some of the power of unix commandline and unix  applications.


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## Rhisiart (Jun 13, 2007)

Thank you all for your responses and information. 

I can see the advantage in having an operating system like OSX, that suits the vast majority of users who really don't need to look under the hood, but have the option to do so if so inclined. OSX's stability is a valuable asset.

However, when it comes to value for money, I wonder whether the availability of much higher quaility open source apps may tempt more users away from Apple towards Linux inspired operating systems?


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## PGTips (Jun 14, 2007)

rhisiart said:


> However, when it comes to value for money, I wonder whether the availability of much higher quaility open source apps may tempt more users away from Apple towards Linux inspired operating systems?



Hehe, no.

I don't do much media, but there is nothing on Linux that comes close to the iLife suite. Nothing on Linux comes close to the iLife suite. 

Professional applications like Photoshop and MS Office are unavailable on Linux. Gimp and OpenOffice do work to some extent, but there are times when you need the real thing. 

Linux is nice. I use it on my desktop at work and I actually find the GNOME UI a lot better than Aqua, but I'm not kidding myself. Linux has a long way to go before being a serious contender to Mac OS X in the home space.


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## Decade (Jun 16, 2007)

The "quality" argument has been used by every technology system in a state of decline.

Sure, Photoshop has wild features, but most people don't need that power. In the past, you would get Photoshop anyway, because you needed some of the features. But, it's fantastically expensive, and its anti-piracy techniques are increasingly intrusive. Now, there's a credible alternative for light uses, and only people whose work needs Photoshop should get it.

Too many analysts mistake familiarity for superiority. You may find iLife to be essential, others may find it too limiting, but probably the vast majority of users will find what comes with Ubuntu to be good enough. The vast majority of users are astonishingly poor judges of propriety. iLife is really nice to use, but you wouldn't know you could record movies or make electronic music so easily if Steve Jobs hadn't revealed it to you.

Linux isn't really that easy to use, but I think it's good enough for the vast majority of users. People keep saying it's not ready for the desktop, but I say it's more ready for the desktop than the Windows versions that dominated the desktop for most of the past 20 years. That's good enough for mass deployment.


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## PGTips (Jun 17, 2007)

Way to miss the point.



Decade said:


> Sure, Photoshop has wild features, but most people don't need that power. In the past, you would get Photoshop anyway, because you needed some of the features. But, it's fantastically expensive, and its anti-piracy techniques are increasingly intrusive. Now, there's a credible alternative for light uses, and only people whose work needs Photoshop should get it.



Most major criticism of the Gimp lies in its strange interface, not its lack of features. Professionals who rely on Photoshop for work apparently have a hard time adjusting to the Gimp. There have always been credible alternatives for light uses. Pity they don't require Linux and are handily available on both Windows and Mac OS X. On the other hand, when you do need to get down and dirty with the heavy lifting, at least Photoshop is an option. No, Wine is never a serious option.



> Too many analysts mistake familiarity for superiority. You may find iLife to be essential, others may find it too limiting, but probably the vast majority of users will find what comes with Ubuntu to be good enough. The vast majority of users are astonishingly poor judges of propriety. iLife is really nice to use, but you wouldn't know you could record movies or make electronic music so easily if Steve Jobs hadn't revealed it to you.



If package X contains the same features as package Y, but is much easier to use since it adheres to the UI paradigms that users are familiar with, who in their right mind will say Y is superior? iLife is good, because it makes things so easy to do. Nothing on Linux comes close without having to fiddle about.



> Linux isn't really that easy to use, but I think it's good enough for the vast majority of users. People keep saying it's not ready for the desktop, but I say it's more ready for the desktop than the Windows versions that dominated the desktop for most of the past 20 years. That's good enough for mass deployment.



The average user is a poor judge of propriety, but technical users are? How easy is it to install software on Linux that isn't already present in the Apt/Yum repository? I love Linux as much as the next geek. But after 7 years of usage, I'm still not convinced that it is ready for the average user.


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## Decade (Jun 18, 2007)

PGTips said:


> Way to miss the point.


Yeah, too bad I'm not really trying to convince you. Just saying what I think is true.



PGTips said:


> Most major criticism of the Gimp lies in its strange interface, not its lack of features. Professionals who rely on Photoshop for work apparently have a hard time adjusting to the Gimp. There have always been credible alternatives for light uses. On the other hand, when you do need to get down and dirty with the heavy lifting, at least Photoshop is an option. No, Wine is never a serious option.


Way to miss my point. Every light use program that I've tried other than GIMP has been missing Curves adjustment. You're mistaking the familiar interface of Photoshop for superiority, and besides most of the criticism I hear about the GIMP is its lack of CMYK support. I'm personally annoyed at the lack of unlimited undo and Photoshop's pretty nice blemish removal tools. Other than that, it's largely featureful like Photoshop, 5-10 years behind (and falling behind because of the GEGL project). Running Linux is about running natively with Linux, so WINE is not a serious option.


PGTips said:


> If package X contains the same features as package Y, but is much easier to use since it adheres to the UI paradigms that users are familiar with, who in their right mind will say Y is superior?


I don't say anything is superior. That sort of argument is used by a system that's losing a fight against a rising newcomer. But at $650 per seat, plus proprietary OS licensing fees, you'd better have a good reason (like you're getting paid for it) to use Photoshop. They're certainly making it clear that they don't want Photoshop pirated.


PGTips said:


> The average user is a poor judge of propriety, but technical users are? How easy is it to install software on Linux that isn't already present in the Apt/Yum repository? I love Linux as much as the next geek. But after 7 years of usage, I'm still not convinced that it is ready for the average user.


I thought so, too, until I saw Ubuntu. It's astonishingly easy to use. The dependence on repositories is part of my earlier point that I explained poorly, that Linux promotes a different way of looking at software. The way the average user should get more software is to add more compatible repositories.

Last year, an average user I know discussed getting a new computer. I told him to get a Mac because the OS is so much nicer than Windows. He was scared off by the price, so he got an HP monster desktop replacement. It was less than a year later, when he saw my father using a Mac, and he found out about GarageBand, that he was convinced to get a MacBook. 

Several years ago, another average user I know sold her import business and started another one. Her old business was using Macs, which they discarded when they went out of business, but she decided to get what's cheap, Dell, instead. Now, she's constantly stymied by its astounding anti-virus program behaviors, while my father tells her how much better it would be if she got Macs, instead.

So, no, average users are not good judges of propriety.


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