Why Fedora ?

[John Wendel]

Benjamin Franz wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
>> Mike McCarty wrote:
>>
>>> I disagree with this statement entirely. Fedora Core is not a
>>> stable release.
>>
>>
>> What exactly does that mean?
>>
>> In my experience, not only is Fedora stable,
>> but so is every Linux distribution I have tried in recent years,
>> as also are all recent versions of Windows -
>> assuming that by "stable" you mean
>> you do not get the "blue screen of death" or equivalent.
> 
> 
> You mean like the recent update to Xorg that rendered many machines 
> completely borken unless you are enough of a system expert to manage a 
> forced boot to run level 3, locating the old Xorg packages in the yum 
> cache and manually force a '--oldpackage' install with rpm from the 
> command line?
> 
> Or perhaps the much too frequent updates to SELinux that have been known 
> to break machines as well (leading to many people disabling SELinux to 
> avoid having their systems rendered unusable randomly by system updates).
> 
> That kind of 'equivalent'?
> 
> Fedora is *NOT* stable.
> 
> You want stable, either buy RHEL or migrate to a different distribution 
> like CentOS, SUSE or Ubuntu.  I *am* a reasonable expert in 
> administering Linux boxes (I've been running Linux systems since the 
> kernels had 0.9x versions), and Fedora still bites me hard from time to 
> time.
> 


I have a perfectly stable FC3 installation. I always boot into run 
level 3, though I do use X. I don't apply updates until the shouting 
dies down on this list. And I don't use SELinux (I'm on a corporate 
network behind multiple firewalls). In fact, these boxes are much more 
stable than our RHEL3 cluster which suffers from bad third party software.

But in general, I agree with your comments about Fedora.

John