[nflug] Fedora 7 Review

[Kevin E. Glosser]

Cyber Source wrote:
> This, what I call, careless attitude they take when they just 
> mangle something, is why I left Fedora in the first place 

In fairness to the Fedora project, I must respond. It's not careless 
attitude that causes these things to happen. The distro pushes the 
envelope more than Ubuntu does. They have two different goals. Fedora is 
a testbed that uses the newest builds available. Ubuntu, with ties to 
Debian, obviously doesn't go that route. Although they try to stay 
current, they strive to provide a stable base and will not sacrifice 
anything to do that.

The reason Sun's Java broke was due to Fedora no longer including an old 
library. They didn't include it, because there wasn't a reason to. It 
was actually Sun's mistake to reference something old, instead of using 
the new. That's hardly Fedora's fault. It is something that happens from 
time to time, however. When you use the latest stuff, you sometimes run 
into backwards compatibility issues. However, the benefits of moving on, 
usually outweigh the disadvantage of these obstacles.

As I tried to relay in my review, sometimes there is compromise when 
using Fedora. Make no mistake, Ubuntu is not without it's own issues. 
There are consequences to their approach as well. I've seen them first 
hand. My brother uses Ubuntu, and I've had to help him fix issues 
specifically related to delays resulting in the Ubuntu project upgrading 
very slowly.

I specifically remember my brother wanting to use Compiz/Beryl a while 
ago and he couldn't. He couldn't because he was using Ubuntu's packaged 
NVIDIA driver. That's fine and dandy, but Ubuntu was very slow in 
updating their package. NVIDIA released a new driver and it took a very 
long time for Ubuntu to release it. That driver was required for 
Compiz/Beryl to work with the hardware my brother had. He had two 
choices, sit and wait or go out on his own and install the latest NVIDIA 
driver manually.

So there are positives and negatives on both sides. And surely, there 
are people on this list that use neither Ubuntu or Fedora and they feel 
their distro is superior. And they'd be right. Whatever you feel most 
comfortable with, is the best one for you.

KEG