You know I have everything from Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 6 all running needed services. I have 2 core 2 servers doing DNS. I have a Redhat 9 box running iptables as my firewall, I have 2 fedora 5 boxes running webpages and squid, a core 6 box doing mail, webmail. To say that if I have anything less than a Fedora core 4 box I have problems is not very bright. Both of my DNS servers are core 2. I have updated named several times since putting them online, but they are running on old hardware, that may not be compat. with newer versions of Linux. I ask a simple question expecting at least some kind of intelligent answer. I have very little free time. I cant update my OS's every 6 months to keep up with the newest releases. Nor do I think that is prudent, if it aint broke dont mess with it. My dns servers work very well. My dhcp server works very well, my firewall works very well. If I upgrade to a newer version, that may not be the case. Most of my packages are built from source not rpm. So an upgrade may fail, so then where would I be. Yea, I'll check the archives.
On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 06:27:58PM -0500, dhottinger@harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
You know I have everything from Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 6 all running needed services.
A wild idea that may or may not be worth a go: your FC5+ boxes should be ready to go. Set one up as an NTP server, and have all the rest get their time from it. This might also work for Windows boxen that won't get updates.
Maybe someone who knows more about NTP than I do can comment on the feasibliity of this idea.
Charles Curley wrote:
On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 06:27:58PM -0500, dhottinger@harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
You know I have everything from Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 6 all running needed services.
A wild idea that may or may not be worth a go: your FC5+ boxes should be ready to go. Set one up as an NTP server, and have all the rest get their time from it. This might also work for Windows boxen that won't get updates.
Maybe someone who knows more about NTP than I do can comment on the feasibliity of this idea.
NTP exchanges time as UTC time.
On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 06:27:58PM -0500, dhottinger@harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
I have very little free time. I cant update my OS's every 6 months to keep up with the newest releases. Nor do I think that is prudent, if
In that case, you really should be running CentOS instead of Fedora. As it is, your machines are break-ins waiting to happen.
Note that FC6 and on will have a 13-month cycle, permitting yearly updates. That may work for some servers where recent software versions are imperative. Otherwise, you're just plain using the wrong tool for the job.
dhottinger@harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
To say that if I have anything less than a Fedora core 4 box I have problems is not very bright.
I'd recommend reading the changelogs from the current versions of all your programs back to the versions you have running to have a better understanding of what has been fixed since then.
Both of my DNS servers are core 2. I have updated named several times since putting them online, but they are running on old hardware, that may not be compat. with newer versions of Linux.
Centos3.x will run on older hardware. Centos4.x should run anywhere your could run FC2. These aren't newer versions of Linux but they are still supported with updates that fix bugs as they are found.
I ask a simple question expecting at least some kind of intelligent answer.
I think it is intelligent to look the expected supported lifetime before installing an OS to see if it matches your intended usage. Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
I think it is intelligent to look the expected supported lifetime before installing an OS to see if it matches your intended usage.
Agreed. I was stunned to discover a hosting company offering FC1 as their Linux platform last year that was completely unaware that FC1 was already End of Life. I asked them what they were intending to replace it with and they were completely unable to answer, instead assuring me that it was still supported. :O
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
It is clear from watching Google Trends URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+fc4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying. Not quickly, but the trend is clear and reaches back years now. I *hope* F7 will reverse that, but without a willingness to support Fedora for more than 12 to 18 months it simply isn't worth the hassle for most people.
Despite Redhat's protestations that Fedora isn't just RHEL beta/technology testbed, in practice that is how it is perceived. Each Fedora is supported just long enough to 'get stable' and transfer technology to RHEL, and then the end user is forced to do an OS upgrade. There just aren't enough people who love reving the OS every 12 to 18 months to a newly unstable release make that viable.
I'm running FC5/FC6 on my desktops right now: I've been running RH since the RH4/5 days (I used Slackware before that back to 1995). But my next upgrade will probably not be Fedora but either CentOS5 or Ubuntu7 (assuming an LTS version is released by then).
If Redhat really wants their technology testbed for RHEL to reach an expanding rather than a shrinking audience, they are going to have to bite the bullet and provide some method for inexpensive support for at least security patches for an extended time ala the old RH boxed sets. I realize they have a problem with it cannibalizing RHEL (which is their cash cow), but CentOS and Ubuntu are already doing a great job of that right now.
Benjamin Franz wrote:
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would be more effective?
Despite Redhat's protestations that Fedora isn't just RHEL beta/technology testbed, in practice that is how it is perceived.
Perhaps we'd be better off if everyone agreed on the process. If you are doing development work and want to build and test against something on the way to being the next stable versions that your code will run under, you'll want to use fedora. If you want to take advantage of the latest many thousands of man-hours of development work in desktop applications on a not-too-critical desktop you'll want fedora or some equally fast-paced distro.
Each Fedora is supported just long enough to 'get stable' and transfer technology to RHEL, and then the end user is forced to do an OS upgrade. There just aren't enough people who love reving the OS every 12 to 18 months to a newly unstable release make that viable.
If you pay attention to your local changes and how to re-create them after the new install, this can be a fairly easy operation. It is particularly easy if you have a spare machine and can overlap running the old and new versions. The question is just whether or not it is worth the trouble. If you don't care about the new stuff, then probably not.
I'm running FC5/FC6 on my desktops right now: I've been running RH since the RH4/5 days (I used Slackware before that back to 1995). But my next upgrade will probably not be Fedora but either CentOS5 or Ubuntu7 (assuming an LTS version is released by then).
Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out updates painlessly across versions with big changes.
If Redhat really wants their technology testbed for RHEL to reach an expanding rather than a shrinking audience, they are going to have to bite the bullet and provide some method for inexpensive support for at least security patches for an extended time ala the old RH boxed sets. I realize they have a problem with it cannibalizing RHEL (which is their cash cow), but CentOS and Ubuntu are already doing a great job of that right now.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to anyone? There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu', and so on. Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's 'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out updates painlessly across versions with big changes.
Granted. And I expect some major bobbles in their future. One or two won't kill them, a steady stream of problems would.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
Only a tiny percentage of the end users will act as testers. Only a small percentage of those will contribute code or fixes. But without the end users _you don't get the testers or developer, either_. If 1% of users submit bug reports, and 0.01% of users contribute code (pulling all of these numbers from thin air - I honestly believe the real numbers are _lower_ based on my own software releases over the years), then you need a LOT of end users to maintain and develop a distribution.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What do masses of silent end users bring to the table? Only *everything else*.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
Benjamin Franz wrote:
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu', and so on.
This has more to do with squeezing everything on one disk and having to choose what to eliminate. It doesn't address the new application version issue. Where do you introduce major-version jumps the first time?
Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's 'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
I guess I didn't phrase that very well. What I meant was that you seem to be saying that to get more users, the distro should try to become more stable. The only way that can happen is to backport bug fixes made
for the current application versions into the old distro versions, trying not to change any behavior. This is a big waste of time for no particular return since it is already being done for RHEL.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What good would it do anyone to have a bug report for FC4 coming in now when current development has moved on long ago? The developers of the thousands of programs included in an FC distribution don't develop for any particular distribution or version, they just keep fixing and adding stuff. Fedora's purpose is best served by staying as close to the current development work as possible instead of backporting fixes to a whole set of releases that are now ancient history.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
Why would these people wanting new ideas be interested in running old stable releases?
On Sat, 2007-02-24 at 16:58 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Benjamin Franz wrote:
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu', and so on.
This has more to do with squeezing everything on one disk and having to choose what to eliminate. It doesn't address the new application version issue. Where do you introduce major-version jumps the first time?
Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's 'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
I guess I didn't phrase that very well. What I meant was that you seem to be saying that to get more users, the distro should try to become more stable. The only way that can happen is to backport bug fixes made
for the current application versions into the old distro versions, trying not to change any behavior. This is a big waste of time for no particular return since it is already being done for RHEL.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What good would it do anyone to have a bug report for FC4 coming in now when current development has moved on long ago? The developers of the thousands of programs included in an FC distribution don't develop for any particular distribution or version, they just keep fixing and adding stuff. Fedora's purpose is best served by staying as close to the current development work as possible instead of backporting fixes to a whole set of releases that are now ancient history.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
Why would these people wanting new ideas be interested in running old stable releases?
If the *only* goal is to continue the evolution of the OS and a fixed set of applications you are right. But if the goal is one of promoting the use of the OS, to continue to acquire and populate the user base by retaining existing users, then a degree of stability in what works is necessary, and desirable.
The OS now supports multiple users, servers, parallel processing, distributed processing (at least offers some facilities for this), and a large application base which may or may not work. Among the application base are a number of GUI's (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and others), Open Office, a group of development tools and almost the full pantheon of languages. Antivirus software Clam, Spamassisn and others. Currently I am working on getting croquet working, and I have some difficulty with video and audio on the Internet which I must get working to make Croquet accomplish what I want. I also need comprehensive video to remain up to date on other developments in the world.
I have no desire to maintain two OS's, with the attendant costs, complexity, and especially the viral susceptability of windows. I want Linux to be the OS of choice because I think it offers me many services that are not available in the Windows platform. Yes, there are other distributions available. But what I like so far is the community here. That is the conundrum, isn't it?
The issue of intellectual property, costs and profits cannot be overlooked. However, the models across countries, across even areas within countries, such as states in the US, make a legal nightmare for sorting out the ways of meeting the computing and advanced communications needs of the public.
I have no answers for all of this, but the answers will come. This software is not really "free". Here we pay for it by the testing and fixing of bugs, which then get replicated into RHEL (and other places). This takes our time, and our effort. However, what is our return for that investment? One return is the use and access to thousands of programs, internet access, and of course this wonderful community of other like minded individuals (although the like mindedness is often in flux ;) ).
But still it would be nice to have some assurance that things will work tomorrow that worked today. I saw a proposal about segmenting the applications into stable and current state of the art. I think that has some merit. But the os then will have to be stable so that the bugs that appear will develop a known causality, and you can separate the OS issues with a known bug base vs the application via its own bugbase. The bugbases already exist for most applications. Maybe this bears some discussion and a proposal to be developed to put before the community?
Regards, Les H
Les wrote:
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
Why would these people wanting new ideas be interested in running old stable releases?
If the *only* goal is to continue the evolution of the OS and a fixed set of applications you are right.
That's the goal of fedora.
But if the goal is one of promoting the use of the OS, to continue to acquire and populate the user base by retaining existing users, then a degree of stability in what works is necessary, and desirable.
That's the goal of RHEL. Personally I think they have done themselves a disservice by no longer permitting free unsupported downloads of their branded product and requiring the CentOS distribution to remove their branding so it looks like a different product even though it is compiled from the same source and inherits the same support.
The OS now supports multiple users, servers, parallel processing, distributed processing (at least offers some facilities for this), and a large application base which may or may not work. Among the application base are a number of GUI's (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and others), Open Office, a group of development tools and almost the full pantheon of languages. Antivirus software Clam, Spamassisn and others. Currently I am working on getting croquet working, and I have some difficulty with video and audio on the Internet which I must get working to make Croquet accomplish what I want. I also need comprehensive video to remain up to date on other developments in the world.
Yes, it is a complex system built out of uncoordinated upstream components. It's not going to work right the first time no matter how much you wish it would. Fedora is the place where it is made to work eventually.
I have no desire to maintain two OS's, with the attendant costs, complexity, and especially the viral susceptability of windows. I want Linux to be the OS of choice because I think it offers me many services that are not available in the Windows platform. Yes, there are other distributions available. But what I like so far is the community here. That is the conundrum, isn't it?
Not once you realize that if you want the latest but risky code you run fedora, and on boxes where stability and long-term update availability is more important you run RHEL or CentOS. The installation and administration procedures are close enough that you'll barely notice the difference. If you want a compromise, you can install fedora in the 2nd half of its life cycle when most of the early problems have been fixed, but plan on a huge update download after the install and having to repeat for the next version within a year. Frequent installs aren't particularly difficult if you've planned for them, but if you aren't using fedora as it is released you have to admit you aren't helping with the process.
I have no answers for all of this, but the answers will come. This software is not really "free". Here we pay for it by the testing and fixing of bugs, which then get replicated into RHEL (and other places). This takes our time, and our effort. However, what is our return for that investment? One return is the use and access to thousands of programs, internet access, and of course this wonderful community of other like minded individuals (although the like mindedness is often in flux ;) ).
Plus, the bug you report may be something that other people don't see as a bug yet, so your participation may result in something tuned to your particular needs.
But still it would be nice to have some assurance that things will work tomorrow that worked today.
The baggage that comes with that is that all the same things that don't work today either won't work tomorrow or they take additional work to backport to old distributed versions without changing behavior. This isn't much of a problem on the server side of things, since linux server applications have been mostly feature-complete and stable for years, but it is a big problem on the desktop where the applications are still changing rapidly.
I saw a proposal about segmenting the applications into stable and current state of the art. I think that has some merit. But the os then will have to be stable so that the bugs that appear will develop a known causality, and you can separate the OS issues with a known bug base vs the application via its own bugbase. The bugbases already exist for most applications. Maybe this bears some discussion and a proposal to be developed to put before the community?
I'd like to see something different where you would be able to keep a working version of the kernel and its device drivers but update any or all applications to current or close to current versions if you want. This would basically amount to running a centosplus kernel with everything from fedora rebuilt for it and it would give you a way to use new apps without having to install an experimental kernel likely to crash your machine. The standard C library and the ones required for the desktop environments are sort-of a middle ground though. Sometimes you need them to match the latest applications and installing them can break old things you might still need. Personally I think it is a mistake that RPM only allows you have one version of things installed at once even though the OS is perfectly happy to have multiple versions controlled by PATH and LD_LIBRARY at the same time. I suppose the workaround will be the overkill of virtualizing the whole machine so you can run both old and new without any memory sharing.
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
Benjamin Franz wrote:
and so on.
This has more to do with squeezing everything on one disk and having to choose what to eliminate. It doesn't address the new application version issue. Where do you introduce major-version jumps the first time?
Good question. One way is tag app versions 'obsolete' when the distro base moves to an incompatible up-version. This is kind of what Legacy did for a while: You got fixes, but maybe you had to upgrade versions of a particular package to keep getting fixes for it. For most packages the difference between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1 is _a lot of bugs got fixed_. It has stunned me for years that RH has never 're-spun' RHEL3 to upgrade actively broken versions of software like Perl 5.8.0 to a more 'bug-fixed' version.
You get an incremental distro upgrade rather than a 'rip my system out by its roots' upgrade most of the time. That lets you reserve the 'OMG' upgrades for rare occasion every few years where it just isn't possible to 'waterfall' upgrade, rather than every 6 months or so. Without requiring tons of backporting.
Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's 'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
I don't buy that. *Every* major distro, including Ubuntu, has 'extra' and 3rd party repository equivalents: It isn't about *need*.
[...]
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What good would it do anyone to have a bug report for FC4 coming in now when current development has moved on long ago? The developers of the thousands of programs included in an FC distribution don't develop for any particular distribution or version, they just keep fixing and adding stuff. Fedora's purpose is best served by staying as close to the current development work as possible instead of backporting fixes to a whole set of releases that are now ancient history.
So go to a 'waterfall' distro model. As new things come out, *put them out*. The current model is the 'one big update' model. Hundreds or thousands of changes made at once.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
Why would these people wanting new ideas be interested in running old stable releases?
They aren't. But their odds of working with someone who does and becoming interested in the front edge of the eco-system is proportional to the *total* number of users of whatever release. A new user will install a new release.
If you have a hundred uber-developers doing nothing but the wicked cool leading edge work and that is your entire distro eco-system, your distro is dead for all practical purposes. You will lose developers faster than people learn of your system and become interested in working on it.
If you have 10000000 end users entrailing 100000 bug reporters and 1000 developers you have a live and moving system that will grow new developers from that immense pool of end users on a steady basis.
Benjamin Franz wrote:
It has stunned me for years that RH has never 're-spun' RHEL3 to upgrade actively broken versions of software like Perl 5.8.0 to a more 'bug-fixed' version.
If they did, they would have to guarantee that there are no behavior changes that will cause surprises. The whole point of RHEL3 is that such things don't happen. Instead they backport the bugfixes that they consider important, so their perl 5.8.0 probably isn't quite as broken as you think.
You get an incremental distro upgrade rather than a 'rip my system out by its roots' upgrade most of the time.
But it doesn't work very well because everything is intertwined. If you update perl you have to update httpd to build the new mod_perl. And so on.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
I don't buy that. *Every* major distro, including Ubuntu, has 'extra' and 3rd party repository equivalents: It isn't about *need*.
It is, but only the single-CD install versions need the specialized builds. For the others you just install what you want - or all of it.
So go to a 'waterfall' distro model. As new things come out, *put them out*. The current model is the 'one big update' model. Hundreds or thousands of changes made at once.
You can do that now by using one of the third party repos that stocks newer builds. You'll break things randomly when things have conflicting library needs - and the same would happen to a distro attempting that.
If you have a hundred uber-developers doing nothing but the wicked cool leading edge work and that is your entire distro eco-system, your distro is dead for all practical purposes.
The real developers are the ones working on the upstream applications shared by all distributions. I doubt if you'll find any of them that are interested in backporting their current work into old fedora versions for people too lazy to install something recent. That's grunge work that gets done for enterprise versions because people get paid to do it and not really part of a community process.
Benjamin Franz wrote: [snip]
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
It is clear from watching Google Trends URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+f c4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=a ll&date=all that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying.
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
More seriously, I see a graph that says Ubuntu must be really bad because more people have to use Google to search for help than they do for Fedora. What do you see?
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, William Hooper wrote:
Benjamin Franz wrote: [snip]
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
It is clear from watching Google Trends URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+f c4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=a ll&date=all that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying.
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
Netcraft reports _web servers_. Not _machines in use_. And doesn't break the servers down by Linux distribution in the statistics anywhere I can find. But since you want numbers from them: 342 sites are reported as containing 'ubuntu' in their host name. 211 are reported for 'fedora'.
More seriously, I see a graph that says Ubuntu must be really bad because more people have to use Google to search for help than they do for Fedora. What do you see?
I see a graph where a steadily growing number of people are searching for information (of any type) relating to Ubuntu while a slowly decreasing number are searching for information (of any type) relating to Fedora, Redhat, SUSE or Debian.
Whether people are searching for help or some other information, they are doing so for _Ubuntu_.
Even _if_ those were mostly requests for 'help', what that would tell you is that month on month more people are looking for help relating to Ubuntu than are looking for help relating to Fedora. Help requests come largely from _new_ users, ergo that would imply there are substantially more Ubuntu new users than Fedora new users. If the street vibe on Ubuntu was _bad_, you would see a downward trend in the numbers as word of mouth spread. Instead you see a strong absolutely relentless upward trend over the last 2 and 1/2 years.
Alexa reports fedoraproject.org had its traffic rank spike around 2000 back in mid-October with the release of FC6 , and the current 3 month average is around 14,000. For ubuntu.com, it spiked around 1000 in late-October with the release of 6.10 and the current 3 month average rank is around 3,600.
Looking in the logs for the big (covering several hundred web sites, none of them in any fashion related to linux or even computers so it reflects just what the general public is using for their daily web browsing rather than specifically tech-heads visiting a linux distro site) webserver I run at work this is what I show for the month of February. I extracted these from roughy 15 gigabytes of raw access_log based on the User Agent matching either Ubuntu or Fedora (non-case sensitive) and excluded all hits from IP ranges controlled by my own company to avoid any biasing by in-house browsers. There are only three people at the company who use Linux _at all_ and they all browse from known fixed IP addresses (even from home), which are easily excluded from the numbers:
Distro Hits Unique IPs Hits/IP address ======================================================= Ubuntu 23770 270 92.4 Fedora 14319 155 88.0
Beginning to see the pattern?
Don't mistake me for a Ubuntu fanboy/evangelizer pushing their favorite desktop: The only Ubuntu installs I have right this second are a test install I did to a VMWare instance in my office and I am in the middle of an experimental install to see if I can get the disk partioning layout I want on a Ubuntu 6.x installation. If it succeeds cleanly, I'm going to finish my rebuild of my house backups server using it. If not, it will be FC6 (32 bit because the 64 bit version of FC6 remains a bit iffy for my taste) or CentOS4, again 32 bit.
I like having all the toys in Fedora - there are 2594 packages installed on my home FC6 64-bit machine according to rpm -qa (I believe that beats anyone else's numbers in the 'how many packages you have installed' part of this thread by a substantial margin).
I have about a decade's worth of experience installing, maintaining and operating RH based systems. I'm damn good at it. I find the Ubuntu installer to be annoyingly difficult to make do what I want it to do for disk partitioning with regard to RAID and LVM.
But I can recognize the the direction and the meaning of the trends when I look at the numbers.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 11:09:16 -0800, Benjamin Franz snowhare@nihongo.org wrote:
that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying. Not quickly, but the trend is clear and reaches back years now. I *hope* F7 will reverse that, but without a willingness to support Fedora for more than 12 to 18 months it simply isn't worth the hassle for most people.
Based on the results of the Legacy project, getting longer support isn't compatible with getting Fedora for free. It seems to only make sense for Redhat to pay for it for about a year. The people who actively volunteer to work on Fedora, don't seem to be that interested in supporting old versions for free.
So it looks like if you want a distribution similar to Fedora but with a longer support lifetime, you should use something RHEL based.
Despite Redhat's protestations that Fedora isn't just RHEL beta/technology testbed, in practice that is how it is perceived. Each Fedora is supported just long enough to 'get stable' and transfer technology to RHEL, and then the end user is forced to do an OS upgrade. There just aren't enough people who love reving the OS every 12 to 18 months to a newly unstable release make that viable.
It seems pretty viable to me. It doesn't have to be the most popular desktop to be a viable one.
If Redhat really wants their technology testbed for RHEL to reach an expanding rather than a shrinking audience, they are going to have to bite the bullet and provide some method for inexpensive support for at least security patches for an extended time ala the old RH boxed sets. I realize they have a problem with it cannibalizing RHEL (which is their cash cow), but CentOS and Ubuntu are already doing a great job of that right now.
You seem to be assuming that all users are worth the same to Redhat. That isn't the case. People who are willing to participate in getting bugs fixed are going to be worth more to them than someone who doesn't. Assuming that there is a net drop in desktop users of Fedora (which googletrends doesn't prove), if they are gaining in users that like what Fedora is good at and are actively participating in the Project, they may be better off.
That said, it would be nice of more effort was put into making upgrades between Fedora versions smoother. Having core and extras combined should be a big step in that direction. Being able to use other (user specified) repositories (in particular Livna) at install time is another big step. This won't handle config file incompatibilities, so there will still be issues. However handling config file changes during upgrades is a lot trickier.
I think that spending effort making upgrades better rather than extending maintenance is a much better way to provide value for the people that use Fedora for what it is good for (having up to date versions of software) rather than people that just show up in netcraft stats or google trends.
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Benjamin Franz -
Bruno Wolff III -
Charles Curley -
dhottinger＠harrisonburg.k12.va.us -
Howard Howell -
Jeffrey Ross -
Les Mikesell -
Matthew Miller -
William Hooper