Why is there no long term Fedora?

[mjung]

Might sound stupid but why doesn't it exist? While 13 months may seem like a lifetime to home users and consumers in general it's next to nothing for the industry at large. I would really prefer to stick with Fedora on our company's laptops (since it's so close to RHEL/CentOS that we run on our servers) but am seriously considering to switch over to Ubuntu LTS since its long term support is just so much less of a hassle than Fedora's oh-look-you-blinked-now-you-missed-it ultra short 13 month support cycle.

Or am I simply missing something?

[flash3780]

There is. It's called Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The purpose of the Fedora project is to develop new technologies to be implemented in RHL. Hence, Fedora is constantly under development, whereas RHL does not change often. Hence, RHL is much more suitable for commercial deployments. Fedora is more suited for folks who want state-of-the-art software and are willing to live with things that are a little bit buggy from time-to-time.

Of course... if you're happily running F10, there's nothing that says you have to update, I suppose. The distro is just no longer supported.

[Dan]

Originally Posted by mjung

Might sound stupid but why doesn't it exist? While 13 months may seem like a lifetime to home users and consumers in general it's next to nothing for the industry at large. I would really prefer to stick with Fedora on our company's laptops (since it's so close to RHEL/CentOS that we run on our servers) but am seriously considering to switch over to Ubuntu LTS since its long term support is just so much less of a hassle than Fedora's oh-look-you-blinked-now-you-missed-it ultra short 13 month support cycle.

Or am I simply missing something?

Ayup. You're right. You're missing something.

I recommend going to the fedora project website and spending some quality time reading through the philosophy and mission statements of the fedora project. The links are above under the FedoraProject link menu.

[marko]

There's also Centos and Scientifc Linux which are effectively the same as RHEL but free of charge and have the same update schedule rate as RHEL

[Dan]

To simplify the search:

http://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations

[mjung]

Interesting. I never saw RHEL as long term version of Fedora. I'm fully aware that Fedora is a project to try out new stuff (see Gnome3 in Fedora 15) but it's also something rather different from RHEL. The latter is for enterprise use, very true, but have you tried installing it on a laptop? It's a giant mess I can assure you, I've tried to install CentOS 5.5 on a Thinkpad T510 about year ago and gave up after about two weeks. There's simply way too much that doesn't work (what do you expect from an ancient 2.6.18 kernel, even with all of Red Hat's patches and backports). Which is why I switched over to Fedora in the first place.

Dan: I still don't see how a long term support version of Fedora would violate either its philosophy, its core values, etc. I'm not saying every version needs to be long term but maybe once every two years. The releases in between may as well be bleeding bleeding edge I couldn't care less.

[NCCarlos]

With all due respect, mjung ...

Linux being DIY, can you guess the direction this is going?

[Dan]

This is the explanation they offer. As to whether all agree with it or not is another matter.

First represents our commitment to innovation. We are not content to let others do all the heavy lifting on our behalf; we provide the latest in stable and robust, useful, and powerful free software in our Fedora distribution. An examination of the latest Fedora platform at any point in time shows the future direction of the operating system as it is experienced by everyone from the home desktop user to the enterprise business customer. Our rapid release cycle is a major enabling factor in our ability to innovate. We recognize that there is also a place for long-term stability in the Linux ecosystem, and that there are a variety of community-oriented and business-oriented Linux distributions available to serve that need. However, the Fedora Project's goal of advancing free software dictates that the Fedora Project itself pursue a strategy that preserves the forward momentum of our technical, collateral, and community-building progress. Fedora always aims to provide the future, first.

[mjung]

Right. Thanks a lot Dan, I must have missed that. Case closed, I'll have to tackle the tedious task of moving away from Fedora and towards something more long term reliable.

Thanks everybody.

[marko]

Originally Posted by mjung

Interesting. I never saw RHEL as long term version of Fedora. I'm fully aware that Fedora is a project to try out new stuff (see Gnome3 in Fedora 15) but it's also something rather different from RHEL. The latter is for enterprise use, very true, but have you tried installing it on a laptop? It's a giant mess I can assure you, I've tried to install CentOS 5.5 on a Thinkpad T510 about year ago and gave up after about two weeks. There's simply way too much that doesn't work (what do you expect from an ancient 2.6.18 kernel, even with all of Red Hat's patches and backports). Which is why I switched over to Fedora in the first place.

Because Scientific Linux is out in version 6 and soon to be 6.1 and RHEL is out in 6.1, a lot of those problems are reduced on laptops. Moving between major versions in RHEL (5.X -> 6.X) implies a modernization of the code by quite a bit.... it's like going four or so Fedora versions.

[flash3780]

Here's a comparison of RHEL and Fedora:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora/