Reasons for choosing Fedora over Debian

[Joel Rees]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus at rath.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years, and I am increasingly
> unhappy with it.

I must say I don't blame you.

I'd rather use Apple than Ubuntu, myself.

> I dislike the Ubuntu One integration, I think upstart
> is irritating, and I am sick of my bug reports vegetating forever in
> Launchpad. Therefore I want to switch distributions, and I have already
> narrowed it down to either Debian unstable or Fedora (but a release, not
> rawhide).

Cool.

I'm just beginning to pick up debian and play with it. (Working my way
through the holes in my Linux knowledge by preparing for the LPIC.)

> Unfortunately I have a hard time deciding between the two, because I am
> very much biased by the fact that I have already used Debian in the past
> and a lot of experience with it. So I invariably come up with random
> nice Debian features which then turn out not to exist in Fedora. But on
> the other hand, all the nice Fedora features that Debian can't offer are
> unknown to me.

I think, rather than not existing, they are done differently. (At
least, that's what I find looking the other direction.)

> Hence, to allow me to make a good decision, I would be very happy to
> hear about your favorite Fedora feature that I would totally miss if I
> went with Debian.

Hmm. How about a different question: How will you know what you are
missing if you just go with one or the other?

> Just to be clear: I am *not* interested in starting a Debian vs Fedora
> thread here. So am only asking for your pro-fedora points, so there
> shouldn't even be the possibility of a flamewar :-).

Several of the replies have suggested this, and I will join in. If you
have the time, dual-boot. Or triple.

Or, if you're like me, use two or three hard drives and quad+ boot.
(It gets a little hard to manage, but it can be done, especially if
you're willing to use monolithic file systems for distributions you're
just testing for a week or so. Also, if some of your OSses are BSDs,
those can slice up a single BIOS level partition as they like, so you
can have more per disk.)

TBH, I'm finding the third hard disk throws a bit of a wrench in the
works. Grub does have a bit of a hard time with two, and it just gets
worse with the third, especially when debian will use grub2 if you
don't tell it otherwise. But dual and triple boot with two drives is
workable.

Joel Rees