So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

[Bill Davidsen]

Charles Curley wrote:
> Or: Why I'm jumping ship to Ubuntu.
> 
> This is intended as friendly criticism, not as flame bait. Fedora devs
> may wish to address these issues.
> 
> I started using Linux in 1994, and Red Hat shortly thereafter. About a
> year and a half ago I reluctantly started looking at other disties,
> and settled on Ubuntu. After experimentation, I started migrating to
> Ubuntu, and completed that in December when I decommissioned the last
> Fedora box in my home.
> 
> I'm migrating to Ubuntu for several reasons, actually.
> 
> * Fedora is more bleeding edge than I'm comfortable with. I need a
>   stable desktop Linux, and Fedora breaks too often.
> 
> * Fewer updates. One might be forgiven the impression that Fedora has
>   a new kernel every week. It just seems that way. Meanwhile Ubuntu
>   updates are few and far between. This has advantages and
>   disadvantages, of course. The most obvious disadvantage being if
>   something is broken in Ubuntu it is likely to stay broken, possibly
>   until the next distribution. I have lived with that and can do so
>   again.
> 
> * Related to the last, no simple caching software. The last I knew,
>   there was no RPM analog to the Debian apt-cacher. This caches deb
>   packages, so that, for all the machines that use it, a given package
>   is pulled in from the mirror only once, thereby reducing network
>   traffic, and greatly speeding updates on other clients of the
>   cache. For Fedora, I used an rsync script, but that meant I had
>   copies of entire repos, with massive redundancy of updated packages,
>   far more than I need.
> 
Um, you do know that by changing a single character in yum.conf 
(keep-cache 1 instead of 0) the rpms downloaded will be left in the yum 
cache? Now I'm told that /var/cache/yum can be shared by NFS, but never 
had the guts. I do copy the rpms to a file server, run createrepo, and 
wind up with a local repo which is all the packages I ever had to 
upgrade on any machine running that release.

Yes, you can put it on a CD, mount it after an install, and update local 
only, if network access is an issue.

I'm trying ubuntu now, too, because it drops in and supports printers 
and scanners and wireless cards I have to configure by hand in FC. Also 
because it shipped on time and FC9 isn't out, so I'm reversing my test 
effort. But if I can run ubuntu on a small machine, I suddenly have a 
ton of firewall machines I thought were scrap.

I like Fedora, but I am seeing more and more places where it gets harder 
to do configuration by hand, while the need to do that grows. Soundcards 
are a symptom.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot