Fedora

[Bruce Labitt]

Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 13:03 -0400, Darrell Michaud wrote:
>   
>> Fedora is very much a bleeding edge distribution. It usually has the most
>> late-breaking versions of packages.
>>     
> <snip>
> </snip>
>> One major downside is the upgrade treadmill- Fedora's support for previous
>> versions does not last long and new versions are released about every six
>> months, forcing a cycle of frequent whole-system upgrades.

>> ...which I actually like myself. :)
>>
>>     
Is there some way to make this upgrade more automated?  It always seems 
so painful trying to remember what little doodads to backup - stuff that 
is not in /home
>> Another difficulty for end users is Fedora's scrupulous avoidance of any
>> software that might have legal issues being distributed in the US, such as
>> most popular audio and video codecs. Fedora does not have built-in support
>> proprietary kernel modules or drivers, such as the ATI and NVidia
>> accelerated drivers. If you want all those things, you have to get it from
>> third-party repositories. Luckily, there are many to choose from that
>> specifically target fedora users. I like freshrpms and occasionally livna.
>>     
>
> And Real Soon Now, rpmfusion will go live. For those that don't know,
> rpmfusion is the merger of livna, freshrpms, dribble and a few other
> 3rd-party repos.
>
>   
RSN, when would that be?  It looks like a good idea...  However their 
website wasn't too revealing IIRC.
>> Fedora 10 is not scheduled for final release until Nov. If you are going
>> to try it I would stick with Fedora 9 and not get pre-release versions of
>> 10 unless you are incurably curious. In general the final release tends to
>> see a massive wave of fixed packages 1-2 weeks after its initial release.
>>     
>
> Sometimes, yeah. Have to freeze the tree at some point, and
> internal/community testing of the development tree doesn't hit nearly as
> much hardware or use cases as the initial release.
>
>   
>> It is an unlikely linux distribution choice for a business use case, or
>> for a non-technical user's situation, but for a technical user's personal
>> system or experimentation system it is fun and interesting.
>>     
> Yeah, I'd generally agree with that. RHEL/CentOS is generally better for
> business use case, IMO (unless you need support for newer $foo). I think
> Fedora is generally pretty good for non-technical users these days, but
> not quite as much so as Ubuntu. It definitely kicks ass for leading-edge
> tech though.
>   
Well, for work, I'm really not quite sure if I'm what the linux 
community would consider a developer.  It feels like I'm a developer, I 
write code in C and soon in python, to do some scientific application.  
I don't develop OS stuff, nor do I want to develop 3D apps, I just need 
to solve a problem.  I wouldn't think I would need "really" new $foo, 
but I guess I do, if I want my 2 year old video card supported (open 
source only). 

So what would "you" do?

-Bruce