Fedora 7 vs. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

[Andre Costa]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:20:10 -0600
"Mikkel L. Ellertson" <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:

> Ryan Li wrote:
> > Dear Fedora User Community,
> > 
> > I have used various flavors of Linux in the past... starting with
> > Corel Linux, SUSE, and then onto Red Hat. The last one I used
> > before Fedora Core 6 was Red Hat 9~ so I had been out of the loop
> > for quite sometime.. (was too busy with Mac OS X)
> > 
> > I don't know much about Ubuntu but have heard that the new Ubuntu
> > Feisty Fawn is coming out a little before Fedora 7 comes out and
> > that it's supposed to be much better (just from word of mouth). I
> > was hoping that the Fedora User Community could tell me 'and other
> > users out there' why we should stick with Fedora.
> > 
> > I'm new to Fedora and like what I've seen so far. I'm hoping that
> > Fedora will be the #1 choice for everyone in the future. Is there a
> > big difference between Ubuntu and Fedora? Please don't feel
> > offended by this. I'm just curious as to why not everyone has
> > already switched to Fedora..
> > 
> > Sincerely,
> > Ryan
> > 
> Other people will probably cover other differences, but to me the
> major differences between Fedora and Ubuntu is that Fedora is a
> Redhat based distribution, and Ununtu is a Debian based
> distribution. This affect things like how services are started and
> stopped, the package manager used, how network connections are
> managed, and things of that nature. This is not a big thing for a
> new user, but it does have an impact on users with experience with
> other distributions.
> 
> Another difference is that Fedora tends to be cutting edge, and this
> sometimes breaks things. There is also a steady flow of updates, and
> it can be hard to stay current without a fast Internet connection.
> 
> Another big difference is that Fedora only ships with "free"
> packages. This means that packages that my not be legal in some
> places probably will not be included. It also means that binary-only
> drivers are not included. So you may find that some hardware that
> works with Ubuntu out of the box may not work with Fedora until you
> download some packages from a repo like Livna, Fresh RPMs, or AT RPMs.
> 
> I guess you could say that Fedora and Ubuntu are aimed at a
> different type of user. For an average Windows user, Unbuntu would
> probably be a better choice then Fedora...
> 
> I hope I never see the day when everyone switches to one
> distribution of Linux. One of the great things about Linux is that
> there is almost always more then one way to do something, so you
> pick the one that works best for you. This goes for distributions as
> well - use the one that meats your needs, and you are comfortable
> with...

I've been using RH-based distros since RH5.2 here at home, the same
used to happen at work (where we were using Fedora on the developers
workstations). IT guys at work decided to switch to Ubuntu due to
better hardware support (mainly on laptops), and for the first time in
ages I am trying another distro (I have used Slackware before RH 5.2).

My personal impressions so far: Ubuntu might be advertised as "Linux
for human beings", but sysadmins could use some attention, too.
configuring services with 'chkconfig' is easier than with
'update-rc.d', prepending /etc/init.d whenever I need to start/stop a
service is a PITA (a trivial script emulating 'service' fixed that).
Typing '/' on the F1-F6 consoles didn't work out of the box (had to
manually load a specific keyboard map on /etc/rc.local to fix that),
and enabling support for ISO-8859-1 locales (en_US and pt_BR) was much
more difficult than it should have been. I am still getting used to
dpkg, and so far the only thing I miss is being able to know the
official URL for a given package, as provided by 'rpm -qi'. Ubuntu's
update manager GNOME applet is _much_ better than the one I tried on
Fedora.

On the user front, I still couldn't install xine nor mplayer, which
means that so far I can't play WMV movies (totem is missing the codecs,
and some of the workarounds I found on the internet did not work).
Other than that, it's the same GNOME, Firefox, JDK, Eclipse etc., so,
once the backend is sorted out, user experience is pretty much the same
(YMMV).

I agree with Mikkel when he says that it's good to have alternatives,
both Fedora and Ubuntu can co-exist and should learn from each otehr
flaws and successes. As for me, I am sticking to Fedora, don't see a
reason to switch.

Regards,

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa