what's so good about Fedora

[TechBoyJK]

it seems hot at our datacenter, and several people i know in person and/or online have made it their focus.... whats the big deal? why not redhat?

 

[eigen]

Um, because Redhat is old. Fedora is kinda like redhat 10. As far as linux gurus using it I doubt that. Most gurus I know use debian. (I use Fedora core 2)

 

[johnjkr1]

It's free, simple to use, very compatible and looks pretty.

 

[Farfrael]

Red officially discontinued its "general public" line of products
Instead they reached an agreement with a groop of volunteers and named the new product (based on Red Hat 9 at the time) Fedora.

 

[Tullphan]

How is this compared to Suse?
I'm a newbie to linux (& yes, I read the sticky on the distros) but don't know which one will be best for me. I don't play alot of games, but would like a stable, powerful, easy-to-install version that will take advantage of my A64 setup.
Ideas? Suggestions?

 

[drag]

I use fedora core2 on my laptop because it has a modern X windows server and the support from online repositories using Yum and Apt.


Basicly with one command I can download and install any program that I want and have the dependances and configuration taken care of automaticly.

See here

Read the "ReposityMixingProblems" and understand that I use third party repositories in addition to the official mirrors.

3rd party ones include ATrpms,Dag, and Freshrpms, eventually probably NewRPMS

With other RPM-based distros you can get the same type of thing going, but it's not nearly as extensive as Fedora's support.

Using 3rd party repositories can cause issues and on average are not as high quality and well tested as the ones you get officially thru Fedora.

For my main desktop I use Debian and have been for a long time and will continue to use it for the forseeable future. My laptop has a crappy onboard video card that requires the newest bugfixes and workarounds I can get. #!@#!!

But Fedora makes it worth it.

That's why I like Fedora over Mandrake or Suse. No googling for some obscure and possibly crappily made RPMs for me!

Redhat is now a completely commercial OS. Fedora is the free version of it, Redhat 10 is DEAD DEAD DEAD. It's not officially supported anymore by Redhat. It's gone the way of the Dodo bird and Windows 98. However you can still get community based support for it from The fedora legacy project.

Remember that older Linux versions are RIPE targets for crackers. Win98 may make a good spam proxy, but Linux is 1000x times more usefull. Without being up-to-date your asking for it.

It's immune from virusses and worms but security is still a issue. Once a cracker gets in the reliability of the OS is now against you. In Windows it crashes so easily if your not a perfect programmer your going to have constant issues. So any unusual software or usage gets spotted because it screws up your computer. With Linux if a cracker gets root he can make it so it can run complex cracker applications run under your nose and you wouldn't notice.

So be paranoid.

Other popular linux distros are:
Debian (i use this for my desktop. It's UBER Apt is the basis for all things great and wonderfull)
Slackware (no frills, most Unix like)
Gentoo (compile from source, heavily customizable. Portage)
ASP Linux (popular in soviet block, ex-USSR countries)
TurboLinux (popular in China and other asian countries. Designed specificly for enterprise markets, like Redhat. Forms the basis for China's infrastructure)
Red Flag (Official Chinese distro, most popular one in China.)
Mandrake (From france, similar to Redhat/Fedora)
Suse (Originally German, bought out by Novell to replace Netware)
Connectiva (Commercial brazillian Linux. Supports Spanish, English, Portug(ese? al?))

Connectiva, Fedora, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Suse, (and a couple others) are all based directly off of Redhat. Mandrake used to be considured a Redhat clone. As time goes on they get a little bit more different, but they are trying to standardize Linux.

Other distros are much more individualistic.

edit:

Check out distrowatch for more details

People sometimes critize linux for having several hundred different distros. However you have to keep in mind that many of them are designed for specific markets and specific usages. Some are language specific, others are special purpose like Knoppix live CD or distros designed for creating routers. Some are purely accademic and are created specificly by colleges for coursework. Many are just ego projects, a guy creates one for a hobby and his freinds install it and they screw around with it together.

Improvements will make it back up to the distros they are based off of, and failures and mistakes die.

So it's a weakness because of the fracturing, but it's also a strength.

 

[spyordie007]

Remember that older Linux versions are RIPE targets for crackers. Win98 may make a good spam proxy, but Linux is 1000x times more usefull. Without being up-to-date your asking for it.

It's immune from virusses and worms but security is still a issue. Once a cracker gets in the reliability of the OS is now against you. In Windows it crashes so easily if your not a perfect programmer your going to have constant issues. So any unusual software or usage gets spotted because it screws up your computer. With Linux if a cracker gets root he can make it so it can run complex cracker applications run under your nose and you wouldn't notice.

So be paranoid.

I disagree; the biggest reason so much of the Windows viruses/malware are so unstable is because they are written (for the most part) by people with poor programming skills. On the contrary the handfull of people who would be trying to crack linux boxes are generally better at programming and/or scripting.

If windows viruses/trojans/malware are written correctly the user wont ever notice that they are running either (and there are some like this).

I do agree that with any OS you should always be paranoid and keep it up to date.

-Erik

 

[Xyl3ne]

Nothing is really good about Fedora. I installed it on Celeron 1200mhz with 256MB RAM and it ran like crap. I put gentoo on the same box, ran 5x better.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Xyl3ne
Nothing is really good about Fedora. I installed it on Celeron 1200mhz with 256MB RAM and it ran like crap. I put gentoo on the same box, ran 5x better.

There is no reason that Gentoo would just automaticly run much better then Fedora. They both use the same kernel, the same software, and the same compiler. The Fedora developers even go thru the trouble to fine tune each package and do optimizations like complier flags, just like you do in Gentoo.

What had to happen was either you choose to run a minimal window manager or some such thing, or that the Fedora install just required a little tinkering to get it to run best on your box.

Gentoo has several advantages over a Distro like Fedora, but speed isn't one of them.

Depending on how you set it up you can do some decent things. For instance right now I am running full Gnome 2.6 desktop enviroment. When I boot up, and everything on my desktop is getting running my computer has used 90megs of RAM. After I have a bunch of programs open and closed after a while of desktop activity I still only have about 200megs used. Now keep in mind that I have over 800megs of RAM on my desktop (running Debian here) so any RAM that gets used stays used and the computer just uses more RAM instead of emptying out ram that is already occupied with stuff. (just incase I rerun whatever application the computer has the info in RAM and doesn't have to re-read it from the disk, unused memory is wasted memory).

It's not until I begin playing games that I end up realy using up the RAM.

I've also seen default installations of Linux eat 200megs of RAM just by being turned on.

So with any distro there is a lot you can do to fine tune things. #1 suggestion is of course using the hdparm utility to tune your harddrive because that's ususally the bottleneck.

With Gentoo you have only what you need installed, and the tweaking is done along the way thru the manual installation and setup. So then it seems to be much faster then anything else.

check out the tips for fine tuning here. Turning off unused services realy helps with Fedora.