Fedora *is* for servers! [was Re: Need advice]

[Bill Oliver]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2014, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Cristian Sava wrote:
>
>> I feel more comfortable with Fedora than with Centos and I run Fedora
>> servers for many years with great success.
>
> Why?
> To me it would be irrational to run Fedora rather than CentOS on a server,
> since the chances of problems arising would be higher,
> and I don't see any compensating advantages.
> I run Fedora on laptops because there is a wider range of apps available,
> but they are not apps that I would want to run on a server.
> I don't think "more comfortable" is a rational explanation for a preference.
>
>

I think being comfy with a distro is a big deal.  I can remember umpteen years ago I was trying to get Red Hat (this was before Fedora) to run on my laptop.  It wouldn't, because there wasn't hardware support -- this was back when part of installing linux was searching for drivers and doing manual configuration on everything.  I stumbled across Mandrake Linux. It had the driver I needed, and all the "drak-whatever" config tools made installing and configuring it a breeze.  So I started using Mandrake on my laptop.

Then I got a couple of gigs doing sysadmin for some folk who agreed to use linux servers.  Guess what -- I installed Mandrake, and stuck with it through the Mandriva years.

During that time, one of the users on one of the networks installed a piece of hardware that required Fedora/Red Hat for some of its controllers (else the manufacturer would not provide support).  So, I started administering the Fedora maching.  I discovered that Fedora had diverged significantly from Mandriva over the years.  I didn't like it -- things weren't in the right place, config files were a little different, etc.  I could do it, but instead of being a breeze, everything was a little bit of a hassle.  Instead of something taking me 5 minutes, it took me 15 minutes.  And, you know -- 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there, and suddenly you've wasted some hours you didn't need to waste.

Then Mandriva collapsed. I had to get used to Fedora.  When Mageia came out, I was tickled pink and immediately installed it -- only to find that now I was in the exact opposite position.  I'm now very comfy with Fedora, and all the Mageia tools an locations are a pain in the ass to get used to.  So, no Mageia for me -- not because it's a bad distro, but because I just don't want to be bothered with changing stuff just to be changing stuff.  I'll do it if there's a reason, but not just for the hell of it.


billo