Submitted by “Is Fedora for its users, or is Fedora for Red Hat? That is, is Fedora a distribution that people should run and to which people should contribute, or is it really, as detractors have often claimed, simply a playground for new ideas on their way to Red Hat Enterprise Linux?”
The original announcement labelled it as being a testbed for RedHat with community involvement.
Although, the last release did seem to be usable. As was the second, to a lesser extent.
My history has been some thing along the lines as follows…
Played with RH8.
Used RH9 -> FC5.
Appart from FC2, I found each next release to be an incremental improvement in stability and functionality (I’m not going to talk about performance, because every thing would be 100% subjective, and I have nothing to back any thing up).
FC2, was to be blunt terrible. But considering the others have been improvements, then whether or not this is a test bed for Redhat, I dont really care. It works.
Why choose Fedora over any of the others that could very well be equally stable/functional or MORE so? Simple, any thing you familiarise within Fedora, your more than likely to meet in Redhat at some point in time, and as I would always choose redhat on the servers, for me it makes it a no brainer.
But, that’s not for every body.
1. Serve the public trust
2. Protect the innocent
3. Uphold the law
4. Classified
Can’t it be both? The users get something for free; the company does too. For once, everybody wins. I see no problem…
No one is saying the users don’t get something. The fact that it’s a community development effort means some users get something, but the question is what users are getting something? Developers, desktop users, office users, server administrators? Many people have pushed to consider Fedora a bleeding edge end user system and others have said “no, don’t subject end users to that unless they ask for it, it’s a test bed.”
Some people use a testbed everyday: Paul Thurrott for one as he states in an older article from today uses Win Vista; for everything.
I think the line has blurred in the last couple of Fedora releases as it’s gotten more reliable, although never more stable from release to release.
Wasn’t there an article a week or so ago about a person (Will Wood or something) coming from Red Hat to bring RHEL’s testing process to Fedora? I do not understand all that goes on with the technical aspects with OSes, but would this new process help to make FC a more stable playground? Would this be a step in the right direction?
I have been using Fedora for the last three years so if it was just for testing I should be in trouble but I have less problems than when I was using Windows 2000.
Is some of Fedora testing for their Enterprise version? Sure, but that doesn’t substract from the fact that it is useable for desktop and server use. If it was just for testing they wouldn’t bother spending time updating the older stable releases.
Free software and not closed software.
If you prefer closed software, don’t use Fedora, use Windows.
Well, fedora is extremely stable linux distro that I used for almost a year now. Even if it is for redhat developmenal purposes, fedora alone is enough to be a full fledged distro for customers, where it surpasses other distros by miles in stability arena.
Surely the Fedora developers aim to make it as stable as possible while not being tied down by the legacy compatability and certifcication requirements of an enterprise disto like Red Hat so it is not unstable as in that it crahses frequently but it is unstable as in things change frequently which is fine for those (such as desktop users and SME servers) that like to have the latest features at the cost of not being fully backwards compatible with older releases
I used Fedora back in the days of RH9 and it was a mile ahead of RH9, especially when it came to moving to 2.6.x kernel, though that was natural progression I would suspect and not something to do with Fedora being purely a playground.
Linux is evolving fast and some people do want to have cutting edge releases to get their hands dirty. I see no problem with this. I know many people that use Fedora for internal SME servers across the board of services as well (firewalling, samba, bind, apache and more).
It’s their decision to use something which they really haven’t tested. Using almost any rapidly released operating system is a gamble, as you’re relying on “someone else” to convince you it’s able enough to do the task.
Even if Red Hat do see Fedora as a testing ground, so what. Ideas, code, concepts etc need to be field tested somehow. If it wasn’t Fedora, then it’d be “Red Hat Innovations” or some other cleverly thought name and Fedora could simply become just another distribution.
I would have thought one of things that puts Fedora on its own is that it can be viewed as a testing ground distribution (to me at least).
C’mon we all know it is done to get the RH name out, and get people familiar with the RH way and all while they are doing that they are testing features in RC to be put into RH in a future release.
Fedora is a general purpose system. It is already used as server (Wikipedia, SourceForge) for the Halo movie http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/10/10/0058251.shtml, workstation (Pixar, IBM for their CELL development) and desktop (take a look to fedoraforum.org.
It is used for the development of RHEL, the difference is the certification, RHN and its larger enterprise aim. However, Fedora has its own technologies that is not included on RHEL i.e yum and Extras repository. I don’t see the problem for Fedora being a testbed for RHEL as the skill from the former can be transfered to the latter for people who are interested to work in larger businesses that use Red Hat product. For me, it is a big bonus.
Also remember that Fedora is the base of the OLPC project software. It actually causes a surprise to some posters.
Overall, Fedora is argually the most versatile system I ever used by far because of it is ability to adapt to the user need. As we speak, one of news feature will allow users to use third party repository for the installation using Anaconda. The point is arguing about the target audience is a waste of time.
At home I have Fedora on for weeks at a time. At work I reboot Windows several times a week.
First I’m a linux and solaris user, but when I read your comment (like others in this forum) I must reply to “I reboot Windows several times a week”.Ok, windows isn’t the “dream of OS”, but I feel mad, because people make comments like this without support (what software are installed, bla, bla…).
Please don’t make cooments like this, without support, because people like me, don’t make it serious!
I use both windows and fedora.Neither one of them unintentially reboots.Virii and spyware aren’t a problem either.Both run fine.
I sincerly prefer unix because it has a real shell.XP should have been in 2001 what OSX is currently.Vista will not in my humble opinion surpass OSX/linux in any way exept raw marketshare.
Please don’t make cooments like this, without support, because people like me, don’t make it serious!
I am sorry you feel that way but to be honest it doesn’t matter what combination of software you use on Windows it will still need to be rebuild once a year and rebooted daily. I installed a virgin system the other day and loaded on windows XP. The second time I rebooted explorere crashed and the desktop failed to appear. A basic, basic, dell system with no software but the default XP install. Kind of sad.
As one of poster noticed, the debate started when Fedora developers decide to update X.org to 7.1 for FC5 which cause the breakage of current driver. Ironically, Xorg 7.1 is done by one of Nvidia developers. It is not a first time such issues occured before. Remember the 4KSTACK debate. Some people managed to get along that problem and Nvidia release the driver to fix the issue.
Fedora is exactly what I need. Quite stable, release new things, release often.
If the client is only going to be happy if they have paid for support and RHEL then FC allows me to test as much as I like without paying for the OS.
I really find the attitude among many Linux/OSS users a bit disturbing sometimes, Is Fedora a test bed for redhat? Is Ubuntu a test bed for Debian? Is OpenSuse a test bed for Suse Enterpirise?
The truth is that open source software, more than any other consumer product out there, is a perpetual test bed for all its users. People who use and pay for Red Hat are glad of the work being done in Fedora, but the Fedora users must also be happy that Red Hat has fostered Fedora ‘s growth, in self interest, but still fostered and nurtured it.
Every distro out there, and there are way too many if you ask me, borrows from others. It is the way of Open Source for testing and innovation to make its way down the line to others who may in turn improve what has been done and also pass it along.
I really don’t understand the elitist attitude that says a for profit company can’t use the free software it has helped foster to make money. It speaks of jealousy and a certain bitterness on the part of developers who wish they were making money on the software, not Red Hat.
I agree with you on pretty much everything except your comment about Debian. The problem is some people dont appreciate becoming free QA for a “for profit” company such as redhat or whatnot. Debian is not corporately funded by any one company so they don’t really fit like Fedora and OpenSUSE do.
Are Fedora and OpenSUSE helping Redhat / Novell respectively? Yes. Is it hurting anyone using software that is expected to change? No, it is helping them. Expecting Redhat to do something like support Fedora Core 2 for 5 years or like they support RHEL is crazy, thats not what it’s meant to be for.
But it’s a fast moving one.
I’ve been using RH since 5.2 and Fedora since FC1.
FC5 is, by far, the best FC/RH release, ever. (Including RHEL, IMO).
-However-, Fedora comes with a price.
It’s an fast-moving project (First to include Xen and SELinux, etc). If you’re looking for a slow-moving distro, get RHEL/CentOS/Whitebox instead.
As for the X.org 7.1 thread my view is simple: (and I voiced it in the ML thread itself)
Even though I’m an nVidia user, I agree with FC people on this issue: Fedora is GPL/OSS; People that are using open source driver must not be forced to suffer because I -chose- to use closed source binary drivers and because nVidia -chose- not to release 7.1 compatible drivers.
I will just have to exclude X.org updates in my yum configuration until nVidia releases 7.1 compatible drivers.
G.
Edited 2006-08-04 10:31
I will just have to exclude X.org updates in my yum configuration until nVidia releases 7.1 compatible drivers.
Or just use the included 2D driver?
… Sadly enough, I need 3D.
But, as I said, this is my problem. Fedora should not be forced to stand still just because of me (and other nVidia/ATI users)…
G.
Very noble,i think the same.
I think the article raises a very good question. Who is beholden to who. Why contribute to something that may actually be more of company led project with good intentions of community involvement but stops if it happens to be contrary to what the company wants? Did that make sense, I doubt it. Where truly does the loyalties lie? Is it a community focused distro ONLY as long as the company gets what it wants?
Where truly does the loyalties lie?
The shareholders?
Of course rh/fedora provide a open distro that you could take amd call your own if you didn’t like the direction it is going. So in that way the power can stay with the community at least somewhat. Projects like freespire do not currently offer that. Fedora also offers a full distro whereas freespire only truly offers a preinstalled set of packages with a limited selection available for installation.
(subject jump)
I wonder if the new intel graphic chipsets are any better performance wise? Or unichrome? Is their a good open 3d card out there?