I have to ask....

[Hyperblaze]

What is it about Fedora Core that folks like?

I didn't mind using RedHat before they completely changed KDE (and sadly Fedora Core kept up with that tradition).

If you say things like "it's easy to install". So are a bunch of other distros.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze
What is it about Fedora Core that folks like?

I didn't mind using RedHat before they completely changed KDE (and sadly Fedora Core kept up with that tradition).

If you say things like "it's easy to install". So are a bunch of other distros.

It's not the ease of install as much as it is the idea of who originated Fedora Core (Red Hat) and the wide spread support Fedora Core has as a result of that, and then comes it's neatness, it's just a neat OS TBH, and this is coming from someone who burned about 80 CD-R of Distrowatch and then finally setting on Fedora Core.

It's also the .rpm idea, that you can have a single file you download and dbl click and it's installed.

Ya I know you will jump on with dependency issues, but for those who bundle in the required packages within their rpm they shouldn't have an issue getting their rpm's installed with no issue.
Also rpm hell got so cold lately I don't remember when was the last time I had a dependency issue.

YUM got some nice upgrades to it, and it's becoming very nice to use.


It just feels as a coherent OS, with a nice widespread support, and a huge user base, I don't see why it shouldn't be this popular ?

Red Hat didn't like phaseout KDE as you are thinking, if you want KDE all you have to do is select a check box in the neat Anaconda install interface and it's there, now I don't know what you are talking about when you say that Red Hat screwed up KDE. But TBH we got to face the facts, GNOME looks more professional and less windows, like and it 's a very smooth and well organized GUI, I don't see any reason why any company like Red Hat shouldn't emphasize on GNOME as opposed to KDE.

I don't want to start a flame war here, but I have to be honest here, KDE just feels like crap to me.
I mean the only thing that I like about KDE is their control center, but pretty much everything else is a crappy looking, non-professional (depends on how you look at it, but again IMHO) and just trying thier best to mimic Windows!

With all honesty I rather have a Windows interface rather than KDE's miserable attempt. I can't think of more than a couple of minor features in KDE that I would like to see GNOME implementing in the future but other than that to each his own.

 

[doan]

FC4 is a good one to learn since RedHat is pretty much the industry standard linux in the corperate world.

 

[Nothinman]

The only redeeming quality of FC is that it's backed by RH, which makes it good to learn if you ever want to use the RH Enterprise Linux stuff.

It just feels as a coherent OS, with a nice widespread support, and a huge user base, I don't see why it shouldn't be this popular ?

See, that's funny because I have the opposite feeling. To me RH feels like a jumble of packages, but Debian feels like a complete, integrated OS.

now I don't know what you are talking about when you say that Red Hat screwed up KDE.

I think he means the way they used the BlueCurve theme to make it look just like their Gnome setup.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The only redeeming quality of FC is that it's backed by RH, which makes it good to learn if you ever want to use the RH Enterprise Linux stuff.

It just feels as a coherent OS, with a nice widespread support, and a huge user base, I don't see why it shouldn't be this popular ?

See, that's funny because I have the opposite feeling. To me RH feels like a jumble of packages, but Debian feels like a complete, integrated OS.

now I don't know what you are talking about when you say that Red Hat screwed up KDE.

I think he means the way they used the BlueCurve theme to make it look just like their Gnome setup.

Again it's back to the topic that learning your way around FC very well is sommething that might payoff on two ocassions the first is your personal usage becomes ver easy and organized, two it might help in your carreer as most companies that use Linux choose Red Hat.

 

[Nothinman]

Again it's back to the topic that learning your way around FC very well is sommething that might payoff on two ocassions the first is your personal usage becomes ver easy and organized, two it might help in your carreer as most companies that use Linux choose Red Hat.

I would argue the first point, FC is a lot more work than Debian simply because of the extremely small number of packages in the base system. You have to go around looking for 3rd party repositories and I've heard some horror stories about some of the 3rd party FC repos out there. With Debian I only need 1 extra repo for mplayer, lame, etc because of licensing issues and that repo is maintained by a DD so I can be confident it won't cause any problems.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

fedora is crap. always has been. the i686 kernel they use is slower than i386 kernel debian/ubuntu uses. the package manngaer plain sucks. the installer comes with a bloated gui installer that does nothing more the installers of ubuntu and for a cutting egde distribution with a expert in mind does not need a easy installer at all

you can tell i don't like fedora can't you.
other than that one good thing aboiut fedora is that it comes with a lot of software pre-installed so i like that. A(but then again debian comes with a repository of even more software managed by the best package manger

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Again it's back to the topic that learning your way around FC very well is sommething that might payoff on two ocassions the first is your personal usage becomes ver easy and organized, two it might help in your carreer as most companies that use Linux choose Red Hat.

I would argue the first point, FC is a lot more work than Debian simply because of the extremely small number of packages in the base system. You have to go around looking for 3rd party repositories and I've heard some horror stories about some of the 3rd party FC repos out there. With Debian I only need 1 extra repo for mplayer, lame, etc because of licensing issues and that repo is maintained by a DD so I can be confident it won't cause any problems.

Oh come on! The only 2 repos I have in addition to Fedora's repo are Livna and Mplayer and I get so many choices. I never had a single issue with Livna's repo.
RedHat is a company and very important one, they can't host thing's that might be conspicious they can't put stuff in there that might backfire at them either from a court or from their clients.

And what's the big deal about adding another repo, so how hard is it ? And what big of a deal is it ? It's all about downloading a release rpm and BAM you got the repo. The standard repos for Fedora are more than suffecient for the person wanting to maintain Fedora and have a reasonable selection of packages, but any one who wants to take it a step further well he / she needs to add as much repos as needed , in my case I only need Livna for everything else that the Fedora Repos don't have.

And why is the rpm so bad ? You know in the real world you will stumble across pakcages that are not available on a repo, in my case if I stumble across some un-common app, but if I decided that I need it, it's all a matter of clicking that rpm and it's installed, I don't think you can do that with Debian now can you ? Just look on the internet how many websites have their apps in rpm format.

I can back up my applications all onto a CD or whatever, and if I go to another machine and that machine doesn't have an internet connection or a slow one I just select them all from the media to install and bam they are there.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Honestly, I've never given it a try. I've always been weary of trying rpm based distros and once I was giving either FC4 or Suse 10 a shot, it came down to Suse looking more professional with its awesome administration program Yast (albeit somewhat bloated). I wasn't sure what FC4 offered and so it was settled.

Also I guess felt somewhat of a distaste because most linux noobs tend to go Red Hat because its the most popular and first thought when linux comes to mind. I'm sure its a good distro, though. I'll probably be installing for a friend for his server because he says he must go with red hat (although he's not sure why..).

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The only redeeming quality of FC is that it's backed by RH, which makes it good to learn if you ever want to use the RH Enterprise Linux stuff.

It just feels as a coherent OS, with a nice widespread support, and a huge user base, I don't see why it shouldn't be this popular ?

See, that's funny because I have the opposite feeling. To me RH feels like a jumble of packages, but Debian feels like a complete, integrated OS.

now I don't know what you are talking about when you say that Red Hat screwed up KDE.

I think he means the way they used the BlueCurve theme to make it look just like their Gnome setup.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. BlueCurve completely screwed up KDE. When it takes 2 hours of changing desktop settings to make KDE LOOK like KDE, we've got a problem I happen to love using KDE. I don't really care if it looks similar to Windows (Linux is not about looking different then Windows, it's about the philosophy behind it).


Linuxator, if you think KDE looks like crap, you have the right to your own opinion. I find that gnome looks like a POS (the user interface). So we have different points of views on that.

And if you actually like the rpm system behind Redhat (that's a nightmare if I ever saw one), then I'm glad that you use it, and not me

What is so bad about rpm? hmmm....how about never knowning where the heck the files are located without a find. No specific location where the documents are, and it's all binary files! (if i recall correctly, I rather have source thanks!)

 

[Nothinman]

Oh come on! The only 2 repos I have in addition to Fedora's repo are Livna and Mplayer and I get so many choices. I never had a single issue with Livna's repo.

And with Debian sid I have ~17,000 packages available with just 1 extra repo. And I have heard people complain about Livna, maybe it's gotten better though.

RedHat is a company and very important one, they can't host thing's that might be conspicious they can't put stuff in there that might backfire at them either from a court or from their clients.

I couldn't care less about them leaving out legally ambiguous packages, Debian is a lot more strict about what gets let into their distribution. But RH seems to consider man pages 'conspicious' because there doesn't seem to be man pages for like 50% of the binaries on the system. Part of the Debian policy is that every binary must have a man page and it's really annoying when there isn't one.

And what's the big deal about adding another repo, so how hard is it ? And what big of a deal is it ?

It's not about the amount of work, it's about trusting someone not part of the distribution to produce packages of the same quality as the official ones.

And why is the rpm so bad ? You know in the real world you will stumble across pakcages that are not available on a repo, in my case if I stumble across some un-common app, but if I decided that I need it, it's all a matter of clicking that rpm and it's installed, I don't think you can do that with Debian now can you ? Just look on the internet how many websites have their apps in rpm format.

RPMs themselves aren't bad, I never said they were. In the real world, I don't download packages from random websites. Just about everything I use is packaged in Debian already. I can only think of one package I have installed that's not part of Debian and I used alien to convert to a .deb and it worked just fine.

I can back up my applications all onto a CD or whatever, and if I go to another machine and that machine doesn't have an internet connection or a slow one I just select them all from the media to install and bam they are there.

And I can mirror an entire repository with debmirror, what's your point?

 

[Nothinman]

What is so bad about rpm? hmmm....how about never knowning where the heck the files are located without a find

Look at the --filesbypkg option to RPM.

No specific location where the documents are

/usr/share/doc is the FHS location.

and it's all binary files! (if i recall correctly, I rather have source thanks!)

Of course they're binaries, wtf is the point of installing the source code? If you really want the source, grab the .src.rpm.

 

[clearodef]

Damn you *nix non-noobs. I'm still learning so this is all very interesting to me and at the same time somewhat overwhelming (as I'm still becoming aquainted). I don't know much about the other distros aside from RH9 (where I started with linux). I find some strong points in that I still have no clue where RPM's get installed sometimes. However, I'm still not very strong in terms of compiling my own source too. I particular enjoy linux, perhaps any distro for that matter, because I like the fact that I can do virtually everything from the command line using SSH. Heck, my SmartPhone has an SSH client on it so I can even work from my phone if need be! It's so great! Despite being far more aquainted with Windows , I also dislike the OS because I have to log in to do anything meaningful.

But I'm learning the *nix world and love it all so far! Any more opinions out there?

 

[kamper]

I used fedora because it's no worse than anything else I've tried. They're pretty good with pushing through new software which maybe isn't super important, but I hate reading about new features and then realizing that my package repository won't have them for weeks or months still. Never really had any problems with package availability, although I added a few (well respected from what I could tell) repos for some stuff. I like yum, as it's the first time I ever really learned how a package manager works. I didn't stop using it until I was trying to work with php and gd together and it simply didn't go and I didn't have time to trace it down/submit a bug report.

Stuff I don't like:
-you issue a yum command, you leave, you come back later when it's done
-teh documentation = suck
-no version has ever played nicely with my ati video card (bought in prelinux days). No other distro (bsds included) has had a problem.

I haven't done much with linux since then and I haven't found 'my' distro yet. I might never settle :sigh;

 

[Robor]

I installed FC4 on my 'server' desktop a few days ago and I'm pretty happy with it. Of course, it's just being used as a file server for storage at the moment. I might do more with it down the road but right now that's it. My laptop is running Ubuntu and I prefer that for a Windows desktop replacement.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: kamper
I used fedora because it's no worse than anything else I've tried. They're pretty good with pushing through new software which maybe isn't super important, but I hate reading about new features and then realizing that my package repository won't have them for weeks or months still. Never really had any problems with package availability, although I added a few (well respected from what I could tell) repos for some stuff. I like yum, as it's the first time I ever really learned how a package manager works. I didn't stop using it until I was trying to work with php and gd together and it simply didn't go and I didn't have time to trace it down/submit a bug report.

Stuff I don't like:
-you issue a yum command, you leave, you come back later when it's done
-teh documentation = suck
-no version has ever played nicely with my ati video card (bought in prelinux days). No other distro (bsds included) has had a problem.

I haven't done much with linux since then and I haven't found 'my' distro yet. I might never settle :sigh;

That I can't disagree about, though YUM is being fine tuned gradually and I am noticing a good deal of improvemetns in performance and function with each YUM update, give it time maybe untill Fedora Core 5 goes official, then you will see a very different YUM from what we have now.

 

[Nothinman]

yum is written in python, it'll always be slower than apt. But as machines get faster, it'll be less noticable.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
yum is written in python, it'll always be slower than apt. But as machines get faster, it'll be less noticable.

What is apt written in ?
And why was YUM written in python rather than whatever apt is written in, note of course the vast time consumption difference ?
Why was YUM written in python ? Could there be perhaps some advantages to that in the medium it's being used in ?

 

[Nothinman]

What is apt written in ?

C++

And why was YUM written in python rather than whatever apt is written in, note of course the vast time consumption difference ?
Why was YUM written in python ? Could there be perhaps some advantages to that in the medium it's being used in ?

Probably just personal preferance by whoever started it, Python is extremely popular these days for some reason. But I really don't have any clue why it's as slow as it is, I can't imagine that python is that much slower than a compiled executable.

If I run 'time apt-cache search gnome | wc -l' it says there's 768 results and it took .878s to do the search and count the results. I don't have a FC box around, what's the timing if you do 'yum search gnome > /dev/null'. Since yum's output is so different you can't do the simple count like I did above, you would have to use grep which would add even more latency. But I did the same thing without the count and the time was about the same, so the wc invocation doesn't cause any real overhead.

 

[pkme2]

I find FC4 a challenge especially resolving dependencies with yum. It's a pain sometimes but since I'm a nerd, it's expected, I've used Fedora Core for 2 years. I'm learning more everyday plus I'm getting old so I need something to keep my brain active.
I have Ubuntu on my other computer and find it no challenge at all. Ubuntu is perfect for new noobs, because it's easy to use.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
yum is written in python, it'll always be slower than apt. But as machines get faster, it'll be less noticable.

I always figured it was because it was simply doing more work than apt. As in, repeating stuff that doesn't really need to be done every time. I have no proof of that, other than that most of the wait time seems to be spent simply analyzing the repositories and once they're in memory it all goes much faster.

 

[Nothinman]

I always figured it was because it was simply doing more work than apt. As in, repeating stuff that doesn't really need to be done every time. I have no proof of that, other than that most of the wait time seems to be spent simply analyzing the repositories and once they're in memory it all goes much faster.

I don't know that it's doing more work or doing work multiple times, but one thing that's annoying about yum is that every package has it's own description file in the repository that yum has to download and analyze. apt only has a few files containing all of the packages on the mirror which means less files to download and less files to analyze.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I always figured it was because it was simply doing more work than apt. As in, repeating stuff that doesn't really need to be done every time. I have no proof of that, other than that most of the wait time seems to be spent simply analyzing the repositories and once they're in memory it all goes much faster.

I don't know that it's doing more work or doing work multiple times, but one thing that's annoying about yum is that every package has it's own description file in the repository that yum has to download and analyze. apt only has a few files containing all of the packages on the mirror which means less files to download and less files to analyze.

That's sort of what I was stabbing at, but you obviously understand it much better. Also, I don't have much experience with apt, but I thought that it kept all the info local (and you'd have to sync with the repo every now and then) while yum went for all the info from the remote repository with every execution. If that's what it is then I'd say the speed is well worth the tradeoff of having to remember to update.

 

[Nothinman]

apt does cache the info, but so does yum (look at the -C switch).

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The only redeeming quality of FC is that it's backed by RH, which makes it good to learn if you ever want to use the RH Enterprise Linux stuff.

It just feels as a coherent OS, with a nice widespread support, and a huge user base, I don't see why it shouldn't be this popular ?

See, that's funny because I have the opposite feeling. To me RH feels like a jumble of packages, but Debian feels like a complete, integrated OS.

now I don't know what you are talking about when you say that Red Hat screwed up KDE.

I think he means the way they used the BlueCurve theme to make it look just like their Gnome setup.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. BlueCurve completely screwed up KDE. When it takes 2 hours of changing desktop settings to make KDE LOOK like KDE, we've got a problem I happen to love using KDE. I don't really care if it looks similar to Windows (Linux is not about looking different then Windows, it's about the philosophy behind it).


Linuxator, if you think KDE looks like crap, you have the right to your own opinion. I find that gnome looks like a POS (the user interface). So we have different points of views on that.

And if you actually like the rpm system behind Redhat (that's a nightmare if I ever saw one), then I'm glad that you use it, and not me

What is so bad about rpm? hmmm....how about never knowning where the heck the files are located without a find. No specific location where the documents are, and it's all binary files! (if i recall correctly, I rather have source thanks!)

I've found a better way, don't install KDE from the CD (in fact I do a "minimal" install anyway). Instead I use the yum configuration from fedorafaq.org and enable the KDE-redhat repo and then do a "yum groupinstall kde" or "yum install kdebase."