Put Fedora 11 on my laptop just out of boredom, some notes:
- Fedora 11 SELinux by default: Cool but confusing
- Fedora 11 repositories: Better selection than previous releases, still not as many choices as Ubuntu
- Ubuntu still wins on the default menu organization for new users (just a bit easier to navigate)
- Fedora bootup vs. Ubuntu bootup is about a wash, they both look good and are fast
- Default themes: Neither will win a competition on looks, Linux Mint is much better looking than both
- Yum vs. Apt: Yum was fast, but a lot of 404’s on the repositories (which is more of an issue of Fedora’s mirror infrastructure)
- PPAs vs. ???: This is where Fedora appears (correct me if I am wrong) to have absolutely no answer to OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. In Ubuntu we can get up to date packages that were not yet officially released using PPAs. OpenSUSE users can download packages from the build service. Fedora really has nothing this fun (I am aware OpenSUSE can build Fedora packages, but the selection is not even close).
- Support: Fedora is a distro that is on the cutting edge. It will never compete in support, but this is intentional.
- Community: Ubuntu community is simply the biggest Linux community on the internet. Nobody is even in the same ball park. This also means that Ubuntu has much more “noise” than Fedora (ie people who contribute nothing and are generally factually inaccurate). Experts may like Fedora more because of the lack of this noise.
So if you are looking to try out Fedora, I don’t think you will gain or miss much. Personally I am going to put Ubuntu back on as I really love software from PPAs, and I love using apt just out of habit. But hope that helps someone who wonders what the differences are or what they are missing.
I have added a screenshot which is the default screen with Gnome-Do with docky theme, but this obviously works in Ubuntu also:
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#1 by Benjamin Drung on July 16, 2009 - 2:41 pm
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Linux Mint uses gnome-colors. If you want the same theme for Ubuntu, either use Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) or the gnome-colors PPA: https://launchpad.net/~gnome-colors-packagers/+archive/ppa
#2 by Chuck on July 16, 2009 - 3:39 pm
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Here is why the Fedora 404’s
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1531
And no, I won’t tell which distro I use.
#3 by Jef Spaleta on July 16, 2009 - 3:59 pm
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Let me ask this.
Can you classify yourself as a new user? Can you reasonably be expected to make a judgement based your experience as a more experienced user as to what new users will find more or less confusing? It’s a serious question. Because you are an experienced user, your experience and bias affect your judgement about what new users need. It’s a difficult trap to avoid. As experienced users we can very easily substitute our preferences as the best settings for less experienced users. The hard reality is, if its comfortable to us, its probably the wrong settings for new users. Your analysis doesn’t go enough enough detail to suggest you were able to avoid that trap.
PPAs are fun? For whom? For MOTU members? How much stuff exists in PPAs that really should be driven into Universe but have not been? Do the existence of PPAs actually hurt Ubuntu’s ability to attract people willing to help maintain Universe? If its easy to package and distribute packages outside of Universe..why bother helping maintain Universe when you can just distribute via PPA? I think you should take a closer look at the dynamic there. How many people publish via PPA and how many people are actually helping to maintain the official packages?
And you have to remember. PPAs are a launchpad specific feature that Canonical does not makes available only selectively to Ubuntu and not to even to all architectures that Ubuntu is ported to. PPAs are not community infrastructure that the Ubuntu community has control over. They are Canonical infrastructure that Canonical allows some to make use of to serve Canonical’s own ends. This is enforced scarcity in the Launchpad service deliberately crafted by Canonical. Is that fun? Now that Shuttleworth is talking seriously about syncing release timescales with Debian, is he going to extend PPA services to Debian as well so Debian users can also enjoy the fun of PPAs? Wouldn’t that be just as much fun as Ubuntu specific PPAs?
And before you even bring it up….the Soyuz backend that make PPAs possible is NOT going to be opened up as part of the anticipated Launchpad code opening. Its deliberately being left as proprietary. How fun is that?
-jef
#4 by Me on July 16, 2009 - 4:08 pm
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Rawhide anyone? But, purpose of this post is to “evangelize” Mono. Nothing (else) to see here, move along…
#5 by LinuxLover on July 16, 2009 - 5:58 pm
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First of all, bigger is not better. PCLinuxOS’s small community is far better than Ubuntu’s. You even get support from the distro owner and maintainer, himself. Besides, Fedora does have a large following, and how big does the community have to be to be effective?
Second, if you compare any of these distros to Linux Mint, Linux Mint wins every time. If you’re a Gnome user, you owe it to yourself to try Mint. It’s as good as it gets as far as Debian based releases. I don’t even like Gnome, but it’s so usable on my Mint install that it’s staying. What does that say coming from a KDE user? Linux Mint rocks…
Fedora is far more innovative than Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn’t innovate at all. Fedora has projects like Plymouth that drop your jaw.
YUM is slow. Where did you come up with YUM was fast? As far as package management is concerned, APT/Synaptic have no competition.
If you want something more usable, NONE of the distros you named compare to Mandriva. PCLinuxOS, does Mandriva a little better, though a little behind the times in kernel version and still using older KDE and such. It uses Apt/Synaptic as the package manager, and they actually listen to their user base better than Mandriva ever did. As it sits, Mandriva 2009.1 Spring is the most polished distro I’ve installed, lately, with Linux Mint taking a very close second.
Using up-to-date packages not released to the public makes your install a ticking time bomb! This is not a plus…
#6 by Brad Griffith on July 16, 2009 - 5:59 pm
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I recently tried out Fedora 11 as well. I have to say, they have several additional advantages you didn’t list:
* Plymoth is much nicer than Usplash, if your graphics card supports kernel mode setting. The transition from the initial boot to GDM to the desktop is very smooth and there is not obvious drops to a black terminal screen as in Ubuntu.
* The new GDM is nice because it has gnome-power-manager and NetworkManager running at the login screen.
* The PulseAudio graphical utilities are much nicer in Fedora.
* DeviceKit is integrated more fully, including the very nice palimpsest disk utility.
* Firefox 3.5 out of the box.
* Thunderbird 3 out of the box.
That being said, I switched back to Ubuntu after a couple weeks of using Fedora on my netbook. The biggest issues I had were:
* The PackageKit GUI, while very nice, was slow and less communicative than the tools in Ubuntu. This could change in the near future.
* Waking from Suspend would often leave me with a locked up machine, which absolutely never happens in Ubuntu on my HP Mini.
Overall, I feel that Fedora benefits from having a large number of core GNOME contributors working on it full-time, but Ubuntu still seems like the more polished and user-focused distro. Can’t wait for Karmic.
#7 by Jef Spaleta on July 16, 2009 - 6:52 pm
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@Brad:
Suspend is a moving target for everybody. I’ve seen reports of Ubuntu not working when Fedora does.
The real question is do you know why suspend works on one distribution versus another? Out of tree drivers installed maybe? Or Is it a specific kernel patch fix or hal quirk setting that makes suspend work as expected that has not propagated back to the respective upstream project?
-jef
#8 by Brad Griffith on July 16, 2009 - 7:27 pm
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@Jef:
Fair enough. I have in the past noticed fluctuations in the stability of suspend/resume, especially when I was still working on a Thinkpad x40. I didn’t spend much time looking into the issue. At the time, I just assumed it was a minor difference in driver/kernel versions. It seemed odd that the boring Intel chipset in my netbook would be having issues, but I did hear that there were some radical/destabilizing changes in the Intel drivers recently.
#9 by Innocent Bystander on July 17, 2009 - 4:33 pm
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I use Ubuntu 9.04 (32 and 64 bits) and also LinuxMint 7. I am new to Linux. Just want to give my opinion about the Ubuntu Community. My main source of tech support is http://ubuntuforums.org. This forum scrolls so fast that most of the time my posts remain unanswered (+50% of the time). Especially now as it seems like there is more posts on the forum (may be a sign of more Ubuntu users?). In anyway, this forum becomes less useful. LinuxMint forum is more responsive.
#10 by joe on July 17, 2009 - 7:04 pm
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“and I love using apt just out of habit”
Finally! A sincere distro comparison – and there’s no irony here.
It’s all (or most of it) down to habit, folks, down to what we’re used to, what we believe in and what we, personally, prefer. Think for a bit – if you take apart version differences due to release dates and look at a given x distros over a year, the package repertoire (apart from some outliers) is mostly the same, major components (GNOME/KDE/XFCE, Firefox, OpenOffice.Org, …) are the same, what’s really different is: relatively low-level tweaks (just how many of you compile your own kernel to get UXA and KMS?), some configuration variables and default settings. And it has always been my deep belief that it’s the default that determine the “average user’s” experience.
As an example, just take a look at Phoronix – I often do – and you’ll see that speed-wise, there are no clear winners (although, admittedly, Ubuntu seems to have a lead quite often. Whether this can be matched by running updates on other distros is another question). Similarly, any distro can be made to look/behave more or less like any other one. So, what wins, and dictates the final verdict, in any distro comparison? Habit!
#11 by Luckchancer on July 23, 2009 - 6:47 am
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Neither will win a competition on Looks?????????? Obviously you have not tried to customise Ubuntu to your taste. and let me tell you it is very customizable . I dont know about Fedora. But UBUNTU , with Wallpaper tray installed along with CLEAR LOOKS , fav wallpapers being flipped every 10 minutes, task bar colours personalized , win.7 is NOWHERE near it(or any other os for that matter)
#12 by Gooboontu on August 31, 2009 - 4:55 pm
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Ubuntu is now more customizeable than it’s been known to be, depending on what you want to customize. However, the things that cannot be tweaked include:
1. The grating, annoying culture. Examples: Ubuntu is human (just because of the ugly brown interface), the official site designer has a coffee obsession, Ubuntu developers have a wacko fetish for alliteration, and strange, imaginary animals (Jaunty Jackalope – lol!).
2. The site is now so overloaded that if you post a question there, and you come back to it more than an hour later, you had better know how to find it again, because it will already have been pushed to the back pages. Come back the next day, and it could be buried under enough posts to make a book or two!
3. Possibly due to the above, the techs there are less helpful than those at other distros, and should you have suggestions for how they could improve that distro, or bugs to report, their opinions tend to be rigid. Ask them why they insist on making you use sudo to work on your system files instead of open an administrator session (an Ubuntu exclusive, as if the rest of Linux-world was full of idiots), you will see just how quickly they turn into war penguins!
I’ve been using Ubuntu since March, and am at last fed up enough to go give Fedora a try. I’m tired of the game of wack-a-mole I keep getting dragged into with bugs in the configurable interface (Ubuntu-style). I’ve had enough of the lame excuses I see posted whenever there’s a sloppy display issue, on anything from video to their gnome panels. Finally, I’ve seen enough bragging of the biggest software repo ever to unload programs which are useless because all they do is crash! The Jaunty Jackalopes want to snivel and snap at their users, so maybe I’ll see better attitude with the distro which wants to Reign!
#13 by Tweet on October 16, 2009 - 11:16 am
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I just have a doubt that I’d like to get cleared , have you ever tried fedora . From the looks of it you are just a upuuuuunt fan trying to jerk around . I don’t mean any offence . You can’t just prove your point by just pointing ubuntu rocks of something ironic of that sort . I’ve tried about 25 distros on this PC and according what I think , fedora is still on top .
#14 by Tom on October 24, 2009 - 6:46 pm
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As a developer, Fedora eclipse install from yum wins it. But I have to admitt, I don’t know Ubuntu that well. I do like the httpd config layout. All in all, I don;t think it matters, what’s incredible is that we now have Linux disto’s that are leaps and bounds ahead of other OSs. “Windows 7 needs to reboot several times during installation”. Laughable.
#15 by Francesco Calvetti on December 29, 2009 - 3:18 am
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@Gooboontu “1. The grating, annoying culture. Examples: Ubuntu is human (just because of the ugly brown interface), the official site designer has a coffee obsession, Ubuntu developers have a wacko fetish for alliteration, and strange, imaginary animals (Jaunty Jackalope – lol!). ”
Oh wow, I cracked up when I heard that; I have been using Ubuntu for over a year; although I tried all of the big linux distros; and in my opinion over a year ago; Ubuntu came out on top; but now my feet have gotten itchy and I feel the need to jump to Fedora, which even over a year ago was second best, but I am hearing some good stuff about Linux Mint, which looked pretty damn good from the pics and known for a being a branch off of ubuntu so I have a feeling if the Fedora doesn’t work out I might as well jump board and go Minty…
Calvetti
#16 by Tejas Hosangadi on January 15, 2010 - 10:03 pm
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I agree that Fedora has its advantages and disadvantages. But one place where fedora is ahead is in server applications such as apache, which are included by default
#17 by Daniel Gaillour on February 16, 2010 - 4:52 pm
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Well, I am a new Linux user coming from the windows world and have recently tried both distributions. My windows background: IT with about 10 years experience supporting windows platform apps. I first installed Ubuntu about 3 months ago and had a good first experience with the OS. All the devices were detected and performed from the start on a machine that I built myself. I still have audio issues that require a reboot to fix periodically. Nearly every install or upgrade that I attempted in Ubuntu had great user support online and good instruction on command lines to use. I found that the community was friendlier that most Linux distros (which often come across as condescending and arrogant towards everyone else that is not running their distro – for example…read some of the comments from other users above) I know, I am a Windows guy, what do I know. Ubuntu just did not have that going on. After running Ubuntu for a week I decided that I like it so much that I permanently switched to it as my main desktop OS. After researching the RedHat line of OS’s I decided to give Fedora a whirl. The box I chose to use was shipped originally with Mandrake, so I figured that the OS should find all the drivers without much problem. Wrong. Video, audio and network cards not found. Nvidia video, AC97 audio and 3Com network card. Pretty standard stuff. The menu options were far less usable compared to the Ubuntu setup too. Since I am already happy with Ubuntu I decided that I did not want to spend too much time just trying to get the system functional using Fedora and installed Ubuntu 9.10 over the existing Fedora installation. The reload took about 30 minutes. Video works, audio works and so does the network card. To Linux diehards, Ubuntu may not be the best Linux distro, but it will likely be more successful in generating converts. In fact, I actually decided to give Ubuntu a try just because a low level user that I support at my job bought a Dell mini with Ubuntu and was successful in using it and liked it enough to consider dumping Windows to go Linux. My thoughts were, “If this user can do it, there must be something to it”. Anyway, that has been my experience and I am looking forward to delving deeper to Linux now and actually have had my desire to stay in IT re-kindled by working in the Linux side of life.