Reasons for choosing Fedora over Debian

[James McKenzie]

On 4/16/11 6:14 PM, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been using Ubuntu for a couple of years, and I am increasingly
> unhappy with it. I dislike the Ubuntu One integration, I think upstart
> is irritating, and I am sick of my bug reports vegetating forever in
> Launchpad. Therefore I want to switch distributions, and I have already
> narrowed it down to either Debian unstable or Fedora (but a release, not
> rawhide).
Here is my 'take' and this comes from someone who has been running Linux 
for almost 20 years (Slackware .91 anyone).

Fedora:  Bleeding edge Linux distribution where anything can and does 
happen.  However, this is where the action takes place and if you find 
something broken it is likely to get fixed (and might break other things 
in the process.)
Debian:  Old, creaking ancient and very, very stable.  However, things 
are less likely to be fixed if you find they are broken.

Both can be used as a Desktop OS, but as pointed out Ubuntu is a much 
more friendly desktop OS, and is a little more 'bleeding edge'.

My suggestions, based on experience and being here when Fedora was 
originally released is that Fedora is Red Hat's "working copy" Linux 
distribution for future Red Hat Distributions and should never be used 
in a production level system.  RHEL/CentOS is where you should be if you 
want a RedHat based distribution, much like Debian is where you should 
be if you want that type of distribution.  Both have their pluses and 
their shortcomings.  What you use is whatever fits your needs and you 
are always 'free' to modify what you get to suit your needs.

James McKenzie