Moving from Fedora to Ubuntu

With a little regret, I'm writing this blog entry. These are my opinions only.

Ever since I've been a Linux user (and now developer) I've stuck with Redhat and Fedora.
Back in 2002 I was happily using Redhat 8.0, then 9, then FC1, FC2, FC3, FC4, FC5 as each were released.

I don't tend to install “distro-of-the-month” as Fedora always did what I needed.
Recently, Fedora has been annoying me (yes, I know some have solutions).

  • YUM, pirut and yum-updatesd seem to want to fight with each other all the time. This stuff should just work but the interaction seems very immature.
  • It's a pain in the arse to use proprietary drivers (some hardware you don't get to choose).
  • Sometimes I need to access NTFS stuff on my windows partition.
  • Fedora Extras is growing all the time, but it is still no match to the packagers of debian.
  • A single broken rpm/yum transaction hoses my entire system.
  • Mirror balancing never worked, and often the yum update would just fail or worse, hang.
  • I was compiling kernel.org kernels by hand to get all my hardware working.
  • Upgrading from stable version to stable version / rawhide using yum sometimes breaks horribly.

So I gave Ubuntu Edgy 2 weeks on my new laptop, vowing to return to Fedora if I found I couldn't do certain things.

Things that have been great:

  • Hardware that just works, or that works correctly after installing firmware.
  • apt-get, it's faster that yum and seems to just work, Plus no meta-data downloading just to install one quick package.
  • NTFS volumes that work out of the box.
  • No arguing over what belongs in extras and core.
  • One CD installer, that doubles as a live CD. This is amazing.
  • The concept of soft-deps, i.e. where a package can “suggest” another but not depend on it. Very sane IMO.
  • Ability to install modified DSDT easily without hacking the kernel.
  • More random oddball packages (that I need for Uni) than in extras.
  • Less licence hassle. Yup, enable the multiverse and restricted repo, and done.
  • Synaptic. It's so much more mature than pirut. And it's easy and quick to use.
  • Community response. I've got better response from Ubuntu dev's in launchpad than I did in Redhat bugzilla.
  • Sane menus. I want to see Firefox and Evolution in my menus rather than “Web browser” and “Email”
  • Boot speed. Not sure what the Ubuntu guys have done, but it's 4 seconds quicker to get me to the login window.

Things that have been less great:

  • Less patches tend to go upstream from Ubuntu than Fedora in my opinion.
  • Compiling a .deb seems very complicated to me compared to a .rpm.
  • No compiz support out of the box.
  • The horror of xorg.conf is back. Fedora seemed to detect stuff automatically which is more sane.
  • No root user. Not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. sudo seems to do what I want.
  • The grub screen is hideous compared to the Fedora boot artwork. (bug filed)
  • The Ubuntu shutdown is slower by one second.

So, after a couple of weeks, I can't imagine going back to Fedora, which is a little bit worrying.
Don't get this wrong, I love Fedora and think Redhat as a company are great, but I think Ubuntu is more the distro for me at the moment.

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

One thought on “Moving from Fedora to Ubuntu”

  1. Don't feel so bad about switching distro, it is not like you are cheating on your wife… :)

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