Why you should consider #Fedora as your #Linux platform.
Let me be clear about one thing from the beginning. I don't think Fedora is the answer for everybody. But I want to list a few reasons why you should consider Fedora. And a few reasons to stay away.
Systems administrators: There is a high possibility you are dealing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or one of its derivatives (CentOS, Scientific Linux...). Running Fedora on a desktop will give you the advantage that any new technology that pops up in RHEL will be old news to you. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and can be seen as a technology enabler/testbed for RHEL.
Software developers: You should definitely have a Fedora system in your build farm. Not in order to support Fedora, as you most probably won't, but to catch problems with new versions of kernels, libraries, etc early. That way you can prepare for code changes before you run into build problems on your supported platforms. Also, Fedora is clean. You have to add 3rd party repositories to get software that is encumbered by patents or other legal problems. By working on a clean Fedora platform you know when you introduce libraries that may not be free, and you can look into the legal ramifications.
Linux enthusiasts: Fedora has a big community. It also atracts a lot of developers. There are several reasons for that. One is that Fedora is close to upstream. The fedora way is to feed all changes and patches up to the upstream maintainers and make as few changes as possible to packages in Fedora. If you like to use your energy going forward instead of trying to halt progress Fedora may be for you. The red Hat involvement also means there are very professional developers on the team. If you really want to go beyond the bleeding edge you can enable the 'rawhide' repositories and run the 'rolling' alpha version of the next Fedora. Just be aware that rawhide may be best used in a virtual machine. rawhide breaks.
Let's look at the other side of the coin. Why should you not run Fedora?
If you think any distro needs to support LTS kernels, Fedora is not for you. Fedora will actually upgrade to newer major versions of the kernel within a Fedora release rather than use a lot of energy backporting critical fixes to older kernels.
If you are not familiar with linux, I am a bit uncertain. On one hand Fedora offers the latest versions of Desktop Environments (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate...) with all the latest GUI bells and whistles to make a user friendly experience. On the other hand sometimes things break. Fedora is bleeding edge, so once in a while it can be nice to be familiar with a command line.
Fedora sometimes forces new technologies into production before they are quite finished. This helps shake out problems, but makes for some rough rides for Fedora users. Personally I prefer being part of that rather than figthing old and obsolete technologies. Among the most controversial such technologies were pulseaudio and NetworkManager. Both matured nicely.
http://fedoraproject.org/ Have a look, and test a spin on a live usb stick. Perhaps Fedora is for you?
http://fedoraproject.org/
For the initiated: what should we look for in the middle ground between Fedora "cutting edge" way of being, and Red Hat "enterprise needs-stable" release? Are there friendly yet stable distros in that family?
SvarSlettI'm much more used to the Debian family, that's why I'm asking.
Thanks!
While I worked at the local university we set up Fedora as our supported linux. But we updated from our own set of repositories.
SvarSlettAll new updates first went into the 'alpha' repos. Desktops belonging to the fedora support team used those repos so we got the new updates first.
When updates didn't cause trouble we pushed them to the beta repos. Those were used by 2 beta testers at each faculty/department.
After a week without troube we pushed the updates to the production repo and everybody got them.
Of course, being a university, some departments just wanted a stable linux as a windows alternative while others acively used linux as their preferred development platform and wanted a distro that had the latest and greatest. And some had to have Scientific Linux instead of Fedora. But most of those could run it virtualized.
This mitigated a lot of the 'bleeding edge' problems, but would be overkill for home usage.