w[h]ich is better ubuntu or fedora.

[James Wilkinson]

Until earlier this month, I was one of the regulars on the Fedora
mailing list. So I have a certain amount of experience to draw on...

In that experience, Fedora and Ubuntu have a lot in common: a commitment
to bringing the latest and greatest in desktop technology to a very
stable desktop; a six month release schedule; a backing company that
brings a great deal of manpower and resources and charges for
professional support[1]; an assumption that you won't pay for the
distribution (just media etc); a close relationship to a very stable,
well-thought of "enterprise distribution" (for want of a better word) in
Debian and Red Hat Enterprise Linux; a fairly purist approach to Free
Software ideals.

Fedora sticks more closely to those Free Software ideals. If you like
the idea of a really Free system, you'll get that in either, but you
won't have to worry about removing "restricted" components from Fedora.
On the other hand, Ubuntu does provide binary-only drivers.

Ubuntu Universe has more software in it than Fedora Extras (although
it's still early days for Fedora Extras): FE, again, is Free Software
only.

Fedora undoubtedly has a *lot* more updates. It will bring in new
versions of programs; it will patch vulnerabilities by upgrading to the
latest version. [2] If you don't have broadband, you're probably better
off with Ubuntu.

Medium-term support for Ubuntu is better: the Fedora team will only
support you for about ten months. The Fedora Legacy team (who are
supposed to take over) don't seem to be quite so prompt at closing
holes.

Maybe I'm not yet sufficiently familiar with the Debian-based
work-arounds: maybe I'm too familiar with the Red Hat way of doing
things. But there are a couple of areas where Ubuntu looks slightly less
well polished than Fedora. For example, my printer has always Just
Worked on Fedora: I've had a number of problems under Ubuntu (see
separate e-mail). I've had a lot of trouble getting Real Media to play
on AMD64 on Ubuntu. Fedora multi-arch (where you can have parallel
installs of x86 and x86-64 versions of the same package) may or may not
be the Right Way to do things, but it does seem to improve
compatibility.

On the other hand, Fedora could really do with a graphical front-end to
yum (it would do the job of Synaptic).

The Ubuntu developers seem to be a lot closer to their user community
than the Fedora ones. [3] On the other hand, there are more Fedora / Red
Hat developers, and more of the big names. 

You might find the SELinux support in Fedora useful if you're
particularly security conscious. If you aren't, you can usually just let
it get on with protecting you without it getting in your way.

I think those are the main differences I've noticed. I tried Debian
several years ago: one of the big things I've noticed is how similar the
two projects are. It's as though they've grown back towards each other.

James.

[1] OK: Red Hat professional support implies RHEL...
[2] That's the theory. In practice, if a RHEL package needs a backport,
and the Fedora maintainer is the same person as the RHEL maintainer
(which is common), they'll both get backports.
[3] That's why I'm here. Fedora makes a lot of noise (for Fedora) about
"community". And there is a good community supporting Fedora. So you'd
have thought that the Project would consult us when they're planning to
change the Official Support Forum from e-mail to web forums.

I wouldn't have minded if they'd listened and then said "We're not
convinced". But they just flat-out ignored us.

So you've got me now.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "[What's] the Eight-fold Path?"
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | "A path -- with eight folds in it."
                      | "That would be -- stairs."
                      | -- "Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation", BBC Radio 4