Fedora stability

[Dave Roberts]

On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 07:47, Davy Brion wrote:
> compared to RH9 there's not a lot of difference, except that practically
> everything is of a more recent version than in RH9.  Stability is the
> same, quality is IMO the same (but then again, how do you measure
> quality?) and there are some nice improvements like yum.
> 
> overall i'd say FC1 is better than RH9.  It's just too bad so many
> incorrect statements have been made on certain sites (*cough*
> slashdot/osnews *cough*) about Fedora.

I would agree with all this. I went from RH9 to FC1 and have generally
found things to be as good or better. I will say that my start was a bit
rocky as upgrading from RH9 was a bit painful and didn't go as smoothly
as I would have thought because of some Ximian Evo stuff I had installed
and some other random RH9->FC1 hiccups. I ended up doing a clean install
and things went better the second time around. Still some issues getting
up2date working, which everyone seems to have a problem with, but most
of that is sorted out (and actually yum eliminates a lot of need for it
anyway).

I do agree with some of the criticism that is leveled at FC1 (and RH in
general) regarding including standard add-ons that it doesn't today. Why
can't they distribute the Sun JRE/JDK, Macromedia Flash, etc., and just
have it all working out of the box? Yes, I know it isn't open source,
but if everybody just installs it all anyway and everybody bumps their
foot on the same patches of rough ground, what's the point? I'm not a
purist when it comes to open source. Yes, I generally like having source
available, but there are some things where that isn't possible (yet!
;-), so suck it up and move on in the mean time. I do understand the
lack of some things where there are legal issues involved (MP3 is a
notable point).

Anyway, I have not used SuSE before, but have used Mandrake, etc. I
generally prefer RH because it has the broadest industry support. If
somebody does anything for Linux, there will always be RH/FC rpms
available. The other distros will have more spotty support, possibly
forcing you to recompile from source every time. Some people like that
and generally do it all the time. I tend to prefer binary rpms where
possible.

I have found FC1 hardware compatibility to be very good. My rig is
pretty standard. The only thing lacking right now is a good ethernet
driver for the onboard ethernet on my NVidia NForce 2 mobo, but from
what I can tell the community at large is still getting that driver in
shape and so it doesn't look like any other distro has better support.

Anyway, I'd give it a B in terms of the initial install if you're
upgrading from RH9, and an A- thereafter (the "-" for the up2date
issues).

-- Dave

-- 
Dave Roberts <ldave at droberts.com>