Quite a difficult one this. I have been a user of Fedora for a couple of years now, and it very much feels like home. Times are changing, and I can feel the pull of Ubuntu.
One major thing that sways me is Tapioca. I’ve tried the rpms from the repository that the Tapioca site links to. They install fine. They just don’t work. I have not succeeded in having a conversation using Tapioca yet. I’ve visited the IRC channel and spoken to people about it, and they all appear to be using Ubuntu. Ubuntu with functioning Tapioca :-(
However, there are some things that push me towards Fedora. Fedora appears to have decent test procedures in place for packages and stuff, which, despite Fedora being ‘bleeding edge’, means that things tend not to break. In my experience of using Fedora, it’s only broken once, and that wasn’t a fatal break: booting didn’t work under the new kernel, but it did under the older one (fix: use older kernel!).
Then there’s this whole other debate about yum or apt. As far as I can tell there’s no real feature difference between rpm and deb (except for deb’s “other packages you may be interested in” feature, which to me seems a little superfluous). I haven’t had any trouble with yum on my machine. Howard managed to corrupt part of rpm by switching his machine’s power off during an update, but still that wasn’t anything to do with yum.
Justyn, a housemate, seems to complain about yum continuously and I just don’t know why. I run local mirrors of the fedora repositories to save bandwidth (there are now 5 people in this house who use fedora), and have absolutely no trouble in using or maintaining them. Justyn complains regularly that yum seems to fail and die. I’m still waiting for him to show me such a case.
My one complaint about yum is that it’s slooow. The situation is apparently a lot better in FC6 because it uses yum 3.0, which has moved the xml parsing into a C library. apt seems to be uber-fast, which is good.
I’ve read and heard a lot of people say “Ubuntu just works”. This is great. However, I read that apparently this has a lot to do with the Ubuntu developers hoarding patches and not sending them upstream.
It looks like I’ll stick with Fedora for a while yet. I feel the need to experience FC6.
3 Responses to “Fedora or Ubuntu?”
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October 22nd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
I quote from the blog you linked to:
A single broken rpm/yum transaction hoses my entire system.
Mirror balancing never worked, and often the yum update would just fail or worse, hang.
So, I am not the only one experiencing problems with yum!
I particularly disagree with this statement on a disadvantage of Ubuntu:
The grub screen is hideous compared to the Fedora boot artwork.
It just lacks graphics, but most importantly I find the Ubuntu GRUB setup faster to select what to boot.
I find this because in Fedora, the screen says “Press any key to change boot” or something as it counts down and then you must select the operating system you want and hit return.
So for example, to skip waiting for the countdown you press enter twice. In Ubuntu, all the menu items are displayed as it counts down (with the default selected) so a single press of the enter key will immediately boot the default.
Trivial? Yes. But just one of a great many things that are just a little bit nicer in Ubuntu.
Justyn.
October 22nd, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Justyn: I was linking to the comments made by kernelslacker. I may agree with you about the grub thing. The sending upstream of patches seems like a major issue to me.
October 22nd, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Maintaining vast arrays of patches sucks for everyone. I understand the ubuntu way is to contribute back to debian, and from there back to the source.