Why you need a Fedora

Why you need a Fedora

If you are involved in any kind of software development or system administration I think you should spend a little time on Fedora. And I will tell you why I think you will benefit from it.

Fedora is a 100% free (as in it contains only code that is under free licenses and is unencumbered by patent claims). Fedora originated as Red Hat Linux, but Red Hat chose to concentrate on the server business and split the desktop-oriented linux out as Fedora. Although Red Hat are very active in Fedora there is no ownership. The reason Red Hat are so active in Fedora still is that it can be seen as a testbed for technologies they want to see matured for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In many ways Fedora is very bleeding edge, but still it is suprisingly stable and user friendly. Fedora will give you the latest releases from upstream as fast as you can reasonably expect from a mostly very stable distro.

If you develop software RHEL is surely on your support list. Have you ever been bitten by build problems after applying updates to your supported build platforms? A library update or a new kernel that breaks your code? When that happens you are in a hurry to fix the problem since the updates are certainly getting installed on production servers running your code as well. This is where building on Fedora could give you an early warning. Add a (possibly virtual) Fedora build server, and flag any build errors on that platform as non-critical. This will give you an idea of incoming trouble long before it hits, and your developers will have a lot of time to understand the issues and fix them properly.

What if you want your software to actually work on Fedora, and need an early warning for build problems on Fedora? No worries. Fedora Rawhide is the pre-alpha version of the next Fedora release. Note pre-alpha. It is unstable. Rawhide has no releases. It is a kind of rolling distro that the alpha versions of future Fedora versions get forked from. You will not always be able to get rawhide up and running, but when successful it will definitely give you an even earlier warning about build problems in your code. Set up your build system to clone your Fedora build system, add and enable the Fedora Rawhide repository. Then update it to the latest rawhide. I will not recommend trying to keep rawhide running for long periods. Just rebuild it from a regular Fedora every time you need it. 

Do you need more reasons to build on Fedora? As noted earlier Fedora is 100% free. There are no packages in Fedora that contain non-free code or code without proper open licenses. If you need to add packages outside the standard Fedora repos to build your code you should check why they aren’t part of Fedora. Will the reason affect your product? By building on Fedora you have the ability to know when you build on possibly non-free code.

If you do systems administration the reasons are similar. Fedora will give you early warnings about changes that affect your job. As a fedora user I have become used to systemd long before the debate went viral. And that is just the latest example. I run Fedora on my main desktop system to make sure I always have the latest tools available. Fedora is bleeding edge. It will break down sometimes. You should know basic Linux system administration. But if your work involves administration of linux servers it should be a given for your desktop.

There is one last thing as well. Fedora is your best bet for a linux desktop if you need to bind into proprietary technologies. Fedora 20 makes it easier than ever to add a system into a corporate Active Directory setup for user authentication. If you live in the borderlands between windows clients and linux servers it could be your desktop of choice. I’ll write more about Fedora in a windows-dominated work environment later.