[SWLUG] Fedora 11 es1371 borked sound

[Steve Hill]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Phillip Muldoon wrote:

> Well, if it was RPM-based, it would be a variation of CentOS since

Not true - lots of distros use RPM, even ones that have nothing to do with 
CentOS.

In any case, I don't see why the packaging method has *any* bearing at all 
on whether the distro likes your hardware - this seems to be a red 
herring.

>       i'm inclined to prefer apt over yum for package management.
>       Even the
>       iPhone/touch uses the apt package management on jailbroken
>       models.
> 
> Again curious for the reasons. We've all read the explanations from the
> fans of one over the eitther, and google is replete with long diatribes
> over ports over apt over yum.  Even more than before as I just google'd
> the differences ;) Still I'd like to hear your thoughts.

I'm sure you can promote any packaging system with a sentence like "Even 
$foo uses $bar" so long as you choose $foo appropriately - I don't really 
see this as any kind of a justification for choosing one over another.

There are advantages and disadvantages with all the packaging systems - 
choose the one that suits your needs the best.  Personally I prefer 
RPMs - very easy to manage and build... I especially find ipkg very poor, 
lacking in most of the features I expect from a package management system 
(but that might not be surprising - it's very light weight which is why so 
many embedded distros use it).

>       Ubuntu has just seemed to be ahead of Fedora in terms of
>       usability for
>       years and seems to have less hassles with hardware (without
>       it being
>       user error).
> 
> You're going to have to qualify this statement, you knew it was coming.

I think this is possibly a "what did you use first" thing.  Personally I 
find Ubuntu very unuserfriendly compared to Fedora, but Ubuntu does seem 
to be an extremely popular introductory distro.  There are probably a 
number of factors here:

Firstly, Ubuntu's marketting machine has been much better than most other 
free (beer) distros - Canonical have sunk a *lot* of money into the 
marketting.  I'll leave everyone to make their own decision on whether 
this was a Good Thing or if they should have been spending that money on 
developers. :)

Secondly, Windows users who are trying Linux for the first time seem to be 
happier with Ubuntu - this may partly be down to the marketting thing (so 
it was the first thing they tried) but also it may simply be that Ubuntu's 
UI is more Windows-like.  Of course, being Windows-like isn't necessarilly 
a good thing for long-term Linux users - I find Windows' UI to be about 
the least userfriendly thing out there. :)

At this point, I'll say that the Linux distros I have mostly used for 
the past 12 years have been Red Hat Linux, Fedora, RHEL and CentOS, so my 
judgement may be coloured by a familiarity with Red Hat based distros.  I 
also haven't used Windows for anything serious in the last 8 years.

> And secondly the the distros are built pretty much from the same 
> software.

Ahh, but it is probably the default configuration that makes most of the 
difference rather than the actual software used.  With enough time, you 
can make Ubuntu *look* very close to Fedora, for example, through simple 
reconfiguration, but who wants to spend the time doing that?

As an example, (I'll get flamed for this, but...) I find Debian a pretty 
horendous distro because the default configuration for *everything* seems 
to be terrible.  Yes, I can spend hours reconfiguring it to act sensibly, 
but why would I bother when I can pick one of a large number of other 
distros which comes sensibly configured out of the box?

I'll also take this opportunity to mention that, in my experience, the 
most popular distros used in industry (mainly on servers) seem to be 
RHEL/CentOS and to a lesser extent, SLES; so whatever you use at home, it 
is very worthwhile having a good knowledge of Red Hat style distros, 
assuming that you're in (or want to be in) that sort of job.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence