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Fedora Core vs Ubuntu for desktop use

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
These days it seems Ubuntu is mostly the dominant choice for desktop as far as Linux goes, but I'm wondering what people think of Fedora for desktop use? I'm seriously considering switching to Linux and I'm stuck between FC and Ubuntu. I run FC for my servers and often VNC into them and really liking it, I played with Ubuntu and it's not bad at all, either, and the desktop effects are cool (only been successful once at getting them to work, mind you).

Between Ubuntu and Fedora which one is more likely to have 3rd party software available for it? I see .rpm files more often then I see .deb so I'm thinking I may have a less hard time with fedora at installing 3rd party software. Think this is really my only deciding factor at this point. I will need to find various alternatives to the software I use such as video/sound editors, image manipulation, etc. Guess my best bet is to probably setup a VM and get everything going the way I want and see how I like it.
 
It's largely personal choice. If you're used to the way Fedora works, I'd say stick with that; Ubuntu and the other Debian-based distros are a good starting choice, but many users, as they get more savvy in the ways of linux, quickly "outgrow" them and move to Fedora or any other distro as well.

As to the .rpm vs .deb availability, RPM is no longer restricted to strictly Fedora/RedHat, so that's why there are more widespread - they have essentially become the "standard" (much like PDF for documents).
 
aloser said:
As to the .rpm vs .deb availability, RPM is no longer restricted to strictly Fedora/RedHat, so that's why there are more widespread - they have essentially become the "standard" (much like PDF for documents).
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Oh I did not know that about rpms, so basically I could install one in debian as well?
 
I use Fedora because it is closer to RHEL, without the baggage. I also don't care much for Ubuntu. Both distros have package lists availabe (I think), so check them out to see which one has more pkgs you need.
Also rpmfusion has been a big help for my Fedora install. The gma500 driver alone was a life saver.
 
I'm a big ubuntu fan. I love the debian package system, and I love the release schedule of ubuntu. My company even uses it for all of our servers now.
 
I can't stand FC or CentOS, yum sucks compared to apt and the amount of packages available in the default repositories of Debian (and Ubuntu once you enable them) is insane compared to FC.

And I've heard of nothing but complaints about FC upgrades, although Ubuntu's had it's share of problems with them too. Since I run Debian sid I don't have to worry about that.

Think this is really my only deciding factor at this point. I will need to find various alternatives to the software I use such as video/sound editors, image manipulation, etc. Guess my best bet is to probably setup a VM and get everything going the way I want and see how I like it.
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Why? What software are you looking to use that isn't already packaged for Debian or Ubuntu?

Oh I did not know that about rpms, so basically I could install one in debian as well?
Click to expand...

You can try, chances are it won't work flawlessly though.
 
Nothinman said:
Why? What software are you looking to use that isn't already packaged for Debian or Ubuntu?
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I do more then just use a word processor and internet. I do lot of multimedia stuff, autocad etc... I'll have to find alternatives for those apps and chances are they wont be "official" distro releases, but 3rd party so they wont be in the repositories. I don't have any specific apps in mind at this point, I still have to research.
 
RedSquirrel said:
I do more then just use a word processor and internet. I do lot of multimedia stuff, autocad etc... I'll have to find alternatives for those apps and chances are they wont be "official" distro releases, but 3rd party so they wont be in the repositories. I don't have any specific apps in mind at this point, I still have to research.
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That's still pretty vague, there's lots of multimedia apps supports in Debian and Ubuntu out of the box. And for Debian there's http://www.debian-multimedia.org which has more stuff and things like mplayer configured with the sketchy codecs.

And I'd be surprised if AutoCAD worked in any distro via WINE.
 
RedSquirrel said:
I do lot of multimedia stuff, autocad etc... I'll have to find alternatives for those apps and chances are they wont be "official" distro releases, but 3rd party so they wont be in the repositories.
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Synaptic has lots of 3rd party stuff in Universe/Multiverse. So some stuff in Synaptic is supported, some is not. For instance, QCad is supported, but varkon, while not supported, is also available. (Edit: Where "supported" means that Canonical officially provides updates.)

Also, I tend to see more Debian-style installers, either instructions for Synaptic or .dpkg files, than .rpm files. It might just be that I'm not looking for them, but I doubt it.
 
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I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux at my full-time job, because we have support for it through our hardware vendor, Dell. And there are also several application (paid-for, enterprisey applications) that only support RHEL. So I know RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora quite well. I last tried out Fedora at Fedora 10 because there were some things about it that I thought I would like over Ubuntu (don't remember what it was, now).

I also used nothing but Red Hat Linux back when they readily distributed the install files for free ( before it became Red Hat ENTERPRISE Linux ), and then used Fedora Core up until I think about Fedora Core 5. That was when I tried out Ubuntu.

So anyway, the point is, I still use Ubuntu on my desktop/laptop, even though I dabble with Fedora every once in a while, and I use Ubuntu Server LTS on any side jobs. I would actually probably prefer Debian Testing on my desktop/laptop, but the whole renaming Firefox thing annoyed me ( not a political standpoint, I just like Firefox to be called Firefox ). I think there may have been a few other little things that I just liked how Ubuntu did it or how it came out-of-the-box in Ubuntu over Debian. But I do like the rolling-release idea of Debian Testing.

Likewise I would prefer Debian Stable on servers, except I like the fact that I can pay for support on Ubuntu from Canonical which I have not had to do yet, but it does give some peace-of-mind for the critical business servers. I also like the improvements Ubuntu made to using RAID with the system and boot partitions, which hadn't made it in to Debian last I checked.
 
RedSquirrel said:
These days it seems Ubuntu is mostly the dominant choice for desktop as far as Linux goes, but I'm wondering what people think of Fedora for desktop use? I'm seriously considering switching to Linux and I'm stuck between FC and Ubuntu. I run FC for my servers and often VNC into them and really liking it, I played with Ubuntu and it's not bad at all, either, and the desktop effects are cool (only been successful once at getting them to work, mind you).

Between Ubuntu and Fedora which one is more likely to have 3rd party software available for it? I see .rpm files more often then I see .deb so I'm thinking I may have a less hard time with fedora at installing 3rd party software. Think this is really my only deciding factor at this point. I will need to find various alternatives to the software I use such as video/sound editors, image manipulation, etc. Guess my best bet is to probably setup a VM and get everything going the way I want and see how I like it.
Click to expand...

Newbie and others that really like a restricted choice in software tend to pick Ubuntu. There are much more software packages available for Fedora, SuSE, RedHat (but it is slower to moving to new stuff), ...

I have run third-party software under Slackware, Fedora, SuSE, Red Hat, and Gentoo distrobutions without issues.
 
af1c0069ea05d4d64be330224 said:
Newbie and others that really like a restricted choice in software tend to pick Ubuntu. There are much more software packages available for Fedora, SuSE, RedHat (but it is slower to moving to new stuff), ...

I have run third-party software under Slackware, Fedora, SuSE, Red Hat, and Gentoo distrobutions without issues.
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Restricted choice? If you enable the universe and multiverse repositories there's somewhere around 30,000 packages available. How is that restricted?
 
I prefer Mint, its like ubuntu with all the multimedia codecs installed already and has most of the stuff i use installed already(openoffice, Gimp, Mplayer, Firefox, thunderbird) And uses ubuntu/deb repos. There are so many packages available its insane, not restriced at all.
 
Nothinman said:
Restricted choice? If you enable the universe and multiverse repositories there's somewhere around 30,000 packages available. How is that restricted?
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Yeah, ubuntu can access all of debian I believe.

BTW, I see way more .debs now than .rpms, with the sole exception of commercial software. Commercial software tends to sue rpms, since Redhat is the primary commercial distro.
Still, how much stuff do you really need to install manually anyway? People don't use linux on the desktop for its paid support, if you can't find open source software to do what you want (which is most likely in the repositories), then you're on the wrong operating system.
 
Fox5 said:
Yeah, ubuntu can access all of debian I believe.

BTW, I see way more .debs now than .rpms, with the sole exception of commercial software. Commercial software tends to sue rpms, since Redhat is the primary commercial distro.
Still, how much stuff do you really need to install manually anyway? People don't use linux on the desktop for its paid support, if you can't find open source software to do what you want (which is most likely in the repositories), then you're on the wrong operating system.
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Well you can't just put the Debian repositories into apt on an Ubuntu machine and get it to work well, the version numbers/names are too different in a number of cases. But Ubuntu does rebuilt most, if not all, of Debian unstable and make it available in their Universe repository.
 
I guess you can call me a newbee, or however you spell it. Took some unix classes but forgot most. Just use linux as a desktop not programming or even writing scripts. Prob never will

but I have used both fedora and ubuntu. And ubuntu is miles above, but you can try them both.

fedora tries to be more 'true' to linux hardcores and it really shows. Fedora is like the polar opposite of what something like mint tries to be. Ubuntu is kinda in between. Try them all, but a hint is ubuntu does everything useful mint does after installing ubuntu-restricted-extras. Mp3, video, fonts, etc. Mint just basically has that package installed by default, and some added annoyances.

I would try both, but good luck getting fedora installed, it wont install on some systems. Unless they finally fixed that. Also fedora is more on cutting edge, which i like, but some say it causes some issues.
 
I've never had issues installing Fedora though I have had some issues installing CentOS (which is based on RH/Fedora) That's for servers though, I have not played with it enough as desktop OS. I think I will end up going with Ubuntu if I do switch as after trying a couple 3rd party apps they are in fact mostly all in the respositories. Guess there's more stuff then I figured. I figured the repositories only really had the standard apps like apache and such, but every video editing app I tried is in there and everything installs flawlessly which is nice.
 
RedSquirrel said:
I've never had issues installing Fedora though I have had some issues installing CentOS (which is based on RH/Fedora) That's for servers though, I have not played with it enough as desktop OS. I think I will end up going with Ubuntu if I do switch as after trying a couple 3rd party apps they are in fact mostly all in the respositories. Guess there's more stuff then I figured. I figured the repositories only really had the standard apps like apache and such, but every video editing app I tried is in there and everything installs flawlessly which is nice.
Click to expand...

Debian sid has almost 30,000 packages available and that's what Ubuntu's universe repository is based upon. Of course they both have more than the bog standard crap like Apache...
 
KeypoX said:
I would try both, but good luck getting fedora installed, it wont install on some systems. Unless they finally fixed that. Also fedora is more on cutting edge, which i like, but some say it causes some issues.
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On one system (Thinkpad T60) Fedora 10 installed without issue. Attempting to clean installing Fedora 11 on the same system, resulted in Anaconda crashing, and refusing to install.

I'm not exactly fond of Ubuntu though either, after the past couple of releases.
 
I always use the even build of fedora seems to by more stable. I work we use ubuntu. I like both os I still prefer fedora. I use fedroa 12 in my everyday workstation.
 
I used Ubuntu for 2 years, then recently switched to Mint. It's so much nicer - more integrated, works out of the box, and feels designed rather that Frankenstein'd together.
 
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