[YLUG] Fedora usability [was Re: clone fedora 10]

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Anthony Edwards <anthony at yoyo.org> wrote:

> My guess would be that Ubuntu has a much larger installed base than
> Fedora at this point, based on the fact that just about everybody
> I know who uses Linux (geeks and non-geeks alike) has at least one
> machine running Ubuntu, and no-one I know (except for a Red Hat
> engineer!) is running Fedora.

Well from the news page at
http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3786726

it seems that numbers using Ubuntu and Fedora may not be that
different although we all recognise the difficulty in getting such
statistics accurately.

I am not sure how you tried installing Fedora, or which version, but
certainly a few years ago there were some versions that did have
install issues on certain hardware that was not uncommonly owned.

Fedora 10 does (like any distro) also have issues with specific
hardware (eg if you use real scsi disks or if you have Intel
Integrated graphics) but for the majority of boxen it installs nicely
(and fast - my main initial installs have typically taken only 11 to
16 minutes depending on the hardware, and before running updates to
bring it to the present day) and I have it installed on 7 boxes now -
and it boots very fast, and is a slick and up to date distro. I have
to say that I personally do not feel that KDE4 is ready for prime
time, and having been a dedicated KDE fan until Fedora moved to KDE4 I
have now switched to Gnome in the hope that once KDE4.2 is released
that it becomes sufficiently usable for day to day use again.  At
present KDE4 does not have the functionality or configurability that I
would accept, and Gnome seems to have come a long way in the last few
years (yes it too has regressions and irritations but not as many as
KDE4!) - However all distros will have to move to KDE4 at some point
as KDE3.5 is no longer being supported centrally.

As for updates - what I do is to set my yum configuration to use the
fastest mirror I can see and run updates from that to the first box.
Yum has been markedly improved in efficiency and speed in the past
year or so. From home on the mirror I am connected to I get around 500
MiB/sec which is around 4mbps and not bad from a standard broadband
line - of course this is very dependent on which mirror you connect
to.  Once done I rsync the package rpms from the main machine to any
other machine that I have just installed, so that the yum update just
needs to execute without a long download. Of course soon after a
release there are usually not too many updates for the first couple of
weeks. However this technique means that only one big download of
updates is needed - and indeed these files can be put on a usbkey and
pushed into another machine wherever it might be if rsync is not
readily usable from another machine, or slow due to a wireless
connection for example. An rsync push on the local LAn even if there
is around 1GiB of rpms only takes a couple of minutes at around
10MiB/sec, and even faster on a gigabit line.

I guess that most of us who use Linux end up becoming very familiar
with the necessary tweaks for our favourite distribution to work as we
want it to, and it is often the case that switching to a different
distro needs a learning curve before we understand the little (!)
tricks needed to get things going as we want. So for most people the
"other" distros, whatever they happen to be, are perceived as lesser
distros than the one we are familiar with. If you only ever talk to
Ubuntu users and use the same distro yourself your world revolves
around Ubuntu knowledge. In my case it is Fedora - and there will no
doubt be the Gentoo enthusiasts on this forum too?

> Speaking personally, I have only ever gotten Fedora to install on
> one machine among the many that I own or have owned over the course
> of the last few years, with that one exception Anaconda has always
> crashed at some stage of the installation process!

I wonder when the last time you did one for Fedora was?

Maybe if you have a spare machine kicking around you might like to try
again - and if there are specific issues related to setting it up
after the install I am sure answers can be worked through either on
this forum or Fedora List

-- 
mike