Trying to figure out of Fedora is for me

[syndacate]

I'm sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong place.

I was reading around about Fedora, my linux history is kind of shallow and limited to a lot of main streamed distros such as Ubuntu, Sabayon, openSolaris, Solaris, Gentoo, Windows, and a few others.

I have another machine (server...but I use it a lot) and I was thinking of putting Fedora on it...I mainly intend to use it for storage, but I'll probably use it a lot, if it was only a storage server I'd put straight up Red Hat on it. I'm usually a big Ubuntu guy but I want to try something new. I was just wondering if Fedora fairs well as a daily user...that would be music, movies, pidgin, basic daily crap. I'm not looking to WINE it up or anything. I read a few places that it's more for the "Linux Hobbyist" which I guess I am, than Red Hat is...I used Red Hat way back when it was on a lap top with an 8GB HD, but haven't really messed with it since.

I have openSolaris currently on my other machine but due to it not recognizing domain names (only IP's) and the ZFS file system blowing ***, I'm ready to wipe that partition. My daily use non-gaming computer is an Ubuntu system, so that should pretty much just tell ya where I'm at, obviously Ubuntu's real big on end usability. I don't mind if I have to mess with it, I'm just talking about the end result.

Anybody have any input for me? Again, I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this.

Phew! I haven't a clue where to start... If you want a stable server environment then CentOS (RedHat with logos removed, etc) is a good choice.

If you like to tinker, then F8 or 9 is great. It does "music, movies, pidgin, basic daily crap" very well, although, restricted codecs, etc, aren't included in the distro and have to be installed from a third party repo (Livna)

All I can say is, download and install it and try it out or grab either the Gnome or KDE LiveCD..

Wayne

[syndacate]

Originally Posted by Wayne

Phew! I haven't a clue where to start... If you want a stable server environment then CentOS (RedHat with logos removed, etc) is a good choice.

If you like to tinker, then F8 or 9 is great. It does "music, movies, pidgin, basic daily crap" very well, although, restricted codecs, etc, aren't included in the distro and have to be installed from a third party repo (Livna)

All I can say is, download and install it and try it out or grab either the Gnome or KDE LiveCD..

Wayne

Live CD's don't mean much to me, everybody says to use them, but when the mouse jerks across the screen and you barely have access to firefox, it doesn't tell you must about the distro .

I don't really care if Fedora "comes standard" with all of these things. I'd rather just know if they're installable - is their packages in the repository about them? Do you have to compile the codecs from source? I don't mind if everything's not here when I get here, but is it all installable-doable, of is the realm that fedora supports low, even if we're not just talking about what it comes with out of the box?

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by syndacate

Live CD's don't mean much to me, everybody says to use them, but when the mouse jerks across the screen and you barely have access to firefox, it doesn't tell you must about the distro .

I don't really care if Fedora "comes standard" with all of these things. I'd rather just know if they're installable - is their packages in the repository about them? Do you have to compile the codecs from source? I don't mind if everything's not here when I get here, but is it all installable-doable, of is the realm that fedora supports low, even if we're not just talking about what it comes with out of the box?

I agree about LiveCDs. Other than special LiveCDs like auditing software distros and partitioning/system rescue discs, I don't see what the fuss is about.

The Fedora repositories are quite extensive, and I rarely have any software that I want to install that isn't in the repositories. Fedora users don't have to compile very often, as a rule. You don't need to compile codecs from source, but you'll have to grab them from a third party repository as mentioned. The typical installation routine for Fedora is issuing a command or two from bash using yum (Fedora's default package manager), or if you prefer GUI methods, opening up the package manager, searching, clicking check boxes, and hitting apply (and of course waiting for the DL*).

Can you give some mention of the specific "basic daily crap" you need to do? I can say that for stuff like checking e-mail, listening to music, watching movies, and browsing the web, Fedora is a great platform (superior to Windows in some aspects as long as you don't need Windows-only software), but you may need to grab some non-open-source bits from 3rd parties (Livna for the moment - there's a 3rd party repo merger in the works but I don't know the ETA on that project).

* Fedora is fairly bandwidth intensive. I wouldn't advise Fedora for someone on a low-throughput connection.

[syndacate]

LoL Well yea, the first thing I did in Ubuntu (when I started to become familiar with the package system) was enable universe (3rd party) reposatories...I got lots of non-ubuntu stuff installed on my ubuntu partition, sometimes what you're looking for just isn't made.

Though yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head as far as daily stuff.

I'm a java programmer right now (college for software engineering (Rochester Institute of Technology)), and basically all I've seen is linux has awesome support for java.

So that's like:
e-mails (I use gmail, whatever), movies, music, web browsing...java maybe?

I'm hoping this can be installed on EXT3 because the problem I had with openSolaris is that nobody can read ZFS format and ZFS format can't read anything else

Even GParted said "WTF?" when looking at ZFS format.

[stevea]

I think you aren't getting very good advice here. Fedora has a huge range of FOSS packages available. In addition some repo's like Livna have many of the critical non-FOSS bits ; drivers for wifi and video, but a lot more too. You can download codecs, from the mplayer site and elsewhere - that's not a big issue for personal use.

The problem is this -- Fedora spins very fast. You will regularly see 100 package updates a week. F9 is brand new (and a little rough). The "roughness" will subside in a month or two. Then F10 will be out in October, support for F9 will dry up in a year. I answer a lot of questions on this forum, but when someone starts out "I'm running FC6 and ..." or even F7, I go on to the next. If you aren't willing to stay reasonable current you really don't want what Fedora has to offer.

Of course with all this change there are constant bugs introduced. You wake up one day and you realize that your laptop no longer suspends, or it suspends but the display won't wake up ,or some USB driver seems broken, or the entire Gnome config thing you just figured out is entirely changed, of the driver you manually installed needs source code revision; *THAT* is the Fedora experience - constant change.

I really really like Fedora - it give me access to 90+% of the stuff I want in binary form and I am experienced enough to dig my way out of the deep potholes that the updates throw my way. OTOH if I need to give an OpenOffice Empress presentation from my Fedora laptop tomorrow you can bet that I will NOT be updating packages today.

Are you prepared to update packages at least every week or so ?
Are you prepared to to upgrade to a new Fedora release about every 6 months ?
Are you experienced enough to solve your own mess (with a little assistance from this forum) when the package updates break your system, break your favorite critical app, make your video inaccessible so you have to repair from a text console ?

Yes you get a lot of new and reasonably well integrated and constantly updated packages. Yes, I'm painting the "downside picture", but these problems are VERY real (scan this forum).

My hunch is that with your experience of other Linux ond BSD derived Unix OSes that you can handle Fedora if you want to. The question is - is this bumpy ride called Fedora really what you want and have time for ? What you (and we this forum) don't need is an unhappy camper stamping his/her feet and whining/threatening to switch back to Windows. That's not good for anyone, and there are a LOT of great Linux distros that cater to different needs.

For example, there are many great Linux distros that have better end-user tools for non-techies then Fedora; Ubuntu, *buntu, PCLinuxOS, Mint immediately come to mind. Centos and RHEL5/5.1 are IMO great commercial *server* distros - I would not want these on my desktop (and yes I've used both extensively). I didn't like my brief experience running Debian as desktop, but I love their wide range of target architectures.

I personally have used Fedora distros for all of my work in recent years ((most recently I develop for a BSD variant kernel((yes -using Fedora !!)))). I've done quite a bit of embedded development and deeply embedded/cross-development work with Fedora. So I am NOT suggesting that Fedora is unusably unstable. I am suggesting that *YOU* must decide if you are capable and willing to put up with Fedora's rate of change and therefore instability. Fedora is absolutely not for noobs.

I tend some wine grapes and in the Spring I have to prune hard spray for fungus & fertilize. In early summer I have to fertilize, and prune again for excessive growth and check for disease. In late summer it's insects and humidity=fruit-rot and tests for ripeness. Then there is a 3 day urgent picking and crushing followed by the parallel wine making, more fungal control, winter prep for the vines, racking, cold conditioning & racking again for the wine, concern about acidity and extent of oaking and vinegar infection and oxidation and brett infection and the trouble of bottling, and then the next season is upon us and the cycle repeats/overlaps.... It's never ending. Similarly with Fedora - there is constant work involved in keeping the basic and your critical apps running. OTOH both are learning processes and you will feel accomplishment at the end. You will experience your "summer of love" when every package you need loads and runs ... months on end. You will also experience your season in hell when for weeks at a stretch each kernel update includes problems that break your system, then as soon as one is fixed another show-stopper bug is introduced.

You've been fairly warned. The question is, are you ready for Fedora, not whether Fedora is for you. Only you can decide.

[Attean]

I appreciate your frank answer Stevea, but I have to ask, what's the point? I am a technical artist and know C++ and Java but am predominantly a power user of 3d apps and the scripting languages within. I was drawn to Linux, and subsequently Fedora, with the desire to gain a greater control over my own work environment and because I'd heard great things about Softimage XSI on Linux. However, from your post I almost get the impression that you lose control rather than gain it, as your environment constantly morphs around you, turning your computer into something resembling the death of t1000 in Terminator 2. I exaggerate but you get the idea. I understand that it's fun to be on the bleeding edge and have a level of control, but isn't the point of an evolving system to make your work flow ever-more-transparent and more efficient rather than a struggle for functionality? Isn't an OS by users for users the entire appeal?

Perhaps you were being too down on Fedora? Am I, as a confused, mostly end-user, wanting to have my cake and eat it too? Probably.

How does Fedora help you get work done faster?

[BKJ1]

I have to agree with stevea and the rest but would like to add to this point "I almost get the impression that you lose control rather than gain". The easiest solution to this and one I use is to:

1. install yum-security
2. Turn off the service "yum-updatesd"
3. Setup up a cron job for once a week check-in with the following command:
yum update --security

This will only install security updates. Works great for me.

[Dan]

syndacate and Attean.

First, go here and read the straight dope from the source.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives?

That being considered, I am running FC6/F7/F8 in both an office and home "daily use" environment with no problems. (Just because a distro hits EOL, doesn't mean it automatically breaks.)

Now, with that said, I have also put several family members into Mandriva Spring 2008 and/or Debian Etch (Stable) for the sake of limited user skills, extended shelf life, simplicity and rock solid performance.

In short, Fedora is great fun, and once tweaked, rock solid ... but it's a tinkerer's distro. (Several members around here had barely finished installing F9 and were already enabling the development repos to get a peek at F10.)


Dan

[JN4OldSchool]

Originally Posted by Attean

I appreciate your frank answer Stevea, but I have to ask, what's the point? I am a technical artist and know C++ and Java but am predominantly a power user of 3d apps and the scripting languages within. I was drawn to Linux, and subsequently Fedora, with the desire to gain a greater control over my own work environment and because I'd heard great things about Softimage XSI on Linux. However, from your post I almost get the impression that you lose control rather than gain it, as your environment constantly morphs around you, turning your computer into something resembling the death of t1000 in Terminator 2. I exaggerate but you get the idea. I understand that it's fun to be on the bleeding edge and have a level of control, but isn't the point of an evolving system to make your work flow ever-more-transparent and more efficient rather than a struggle for functionality? Isn't an OS by users for users the entire appeal?

Perhaps you were being too down on Fedora? Am I, as a confused, mostly end-user, wanting to have my cake and eat it too? Probably.

How does Fedora help you get work done faster?

No, Stevea hit the nail right on the head. But as far as "losing" control, I dont see it like that. I learn much more by fixing these constant changes. Very rarely will Fedora "break" something, most often it is just keeping up with the changes, and that is the fun of it. I use Fedora to run my business. I have multiple computers to fall back on if one breaks, which never happens, and I am my own boss so if I go down for the day...so what? That said, I will NOT install F9 on my work computers at this point. In a month or two? You bet! See, like most in here, I just cant stand a solid, non-changing system. Debian etch is the "perfect" Linux distro, but I hated running it. I didnt have to ever do anything once installed and set up. It didnt even really update, Stevea was not exaggerating the Fedora updates BTW. I run yum darn near every day, if I miss a couple days I usually have 300MB + waiting on me!

Tinkerers distro is a good description, it really is an unusual niche here in Fedora land. We demand performance but get bored by stability...no, that's wrong, and that is the funny part. Once you know your way around fedora it is the most stable distro going. It just changes. Changes a lot and changes fast. Try it, you might like it. If not, no hard feelings. We understand it takes a certain type to use this distro, just as gentoo users are...well...gentoo users...

[ovadyah]

Originally Posted by JN4OldSchool

No, Stevea hit the nail right on the head. But as far as "losing" control, I dont see it like that. I learn much more by fixing these constant changes. Very rarely will Fedora "break" something, most often it is just keeping up with the changes, and that is the fun of it. I use Fedora to run my business. I have multiple computers to fall back on if one breaks, which never happens, and I am my own boss so if I go down for the day...so what? That said, I will NOT install F9 on my work computers at this point. In a month or two? You bet! See, like most in here, I just cant stand a solid, non-changing system. Debian etch is the "perfect" Linux distro, but I hated running it. I didnt have to ever do anything once installed and set up. It didnt even really update, Stevea was not exaggerating the Fedora updates BTW. I run yum darn near every day, if I miss a couple days I usually have 300MB + waiting on me!

Tinkerers distro is a good description, it really is an unusual niche here in Fedora land. We demand performance but get bored by stability...no, that's wrong, and that is the funny part. Once you know your way around fedora it is the most stable distro going. It just changes. Changes a lot and changes fast. Try it, you might like it. If not, no hard feelings. We understand it takes a certain type to use this distro, just as gentoo users are...well...gentoo users...

Thanks guys for putting my thoughts into words. I wish I had said that.

[juanfgs]

@stevea
I thought Fedora was a GNU/Linux distro not a martial arts style ;-) .

You've been fairly warned. The question is, are you ready for Fedora, not whether Fedora is for you. Only you can decide.

Just kidding, your post is great and I did myself exactly the same question some weeks ago. But I'm a person that prefers learning, and I love to try new software, Fedora gives me the feeling that I had when I switched to Linux, a whole world to discover, but Fedora is also extremely dynamic and that's something really fun (at least for me) .

[stevea]

BKJ1's approach (only apply security updates) is workable to a point. But when you wait a month or two, then need to install a little app you may find it comes with 1GB of accumulated dependencies.

I see BKJ1's approach as reducing the number of times you have to deal with instability, but each time will be a bigger set of changes/more instability. It's really a matter of taking your instability in small bits every day or two like JN4OldSchool .vs. taking a big amount of instability all at once when you need some new package.
--
Dans; approach of hanging on to ancient Fedora releases after obsolescence is IMO a very bad idea. For example his FC6 installation has a gaping security hole in it (The vpages kernel problem ... was discovered around March'08 I believe) and there is no simple way to get a fix for it on FC6. It's IMO unacceptable for a desktop system. For a server use Centos (5yr ttimeline) or something w/a lower lrte of change.
===
Of course both approaches beg the question - Why would Dan & BKJ1 choose a distro which is fundamentally about constant high rates of change, and then try to avoid the changes. It's not reasonable IMO.


How unstable is Fedora ?

If you scan this forum for the past week you will see a lot of new F9 problems. Many are from ppl who are re-discovering that they don't know how to deal with grub or LVM. Many posts are fm ppl who can't config their networks under F9. Many more are fm ppl who can't get the video interfaces working at all under F9. Others can't get the proprietary vid drivers installed on the new Xorg/X11. There are the more subtle problems - Gnome-GDM & NM and automount and a bunch of other things work differently on F9 an on F8. KDE4 too. This is a regular 6 month peak, followed by ~5 months of other ppl tripping over these same problems and the slower but consistent introduction of new bugs (and many fixes), then back to a peak with F10 around October.

I am not "down on Fedora"; I love it, but understand that Fedora is a high level of change, and therefore a substantial level of instability. Change/Instability are two inseparable sides of the same coin. If you avoid the change you don't really have Fedora at all - it's static image - it's the difference between a picture of a park vs being in a park.

We all have a desire for stability but it's a ultimately a fantasy unless you reject all change. If you recognize the Change/Instability duality and then you can choose a level that you prefer. The level of change/instability that Fedora presents exceeds the tolerance of many users.

[stevea]

Thanks for the nice comment Juanfgs -but no martial arts reference was intended.

Fedora is a bit like a garden; there are two questions involved -
- does the garden provide what I want ?
- can I maintain the garden ?

Many ppl ignore the second question and end up with a mess.

[muep]

I'd like to give a more positive view on Fedora than what stevea gave. I have been using Fedora for a year and a half, since the release of FC6. I have always kept my installations current, and have got a lot of updates at times. However, I have experienced very little breakage, so I think the packages in Fedora are of quite high quality. Sometimes an update has broken a non-free graphics driver or something similar, but mostly Fedora just gets better due to them. For example, my motherboard's sound chip wouldn't work in FC6 at release time, but a few months later I noticed it had started working very well.

There is a constant change in Fedora, but if one doesn't do any bizarre tweaks or hacks in the configuration, I think it mostly works just fine. If one wants to have as trouble-free operation as possible, however, I'd recommend a more conservative distribution, like CentOS.