Fedora? I am a little confused about it.

[kaldor]

Some people say you cannot get any better than Fedora's stability, others say that it is highly unstable. Also, is Fedora the FOSS version of RHEL? Or is it a separate project by RedHat altogether?

Just wondering, as I am unsure about it.

[Dragonbite]

Some people say you cannot get any better than Fedora's stability, others say that it is highly unstable. Also, is Fedora the FOSS version of RHEL? Or is it a separate project by RedHat altogether?

Just wondering, as I am unsure about it.

Fedora is Red Hat's community testing grounds.

They use the Community distribution to test out new and bleeding edge technology and if it proves good enough, or desirable enough then they move it into their full Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version which they offer paid support for.

Since it is more bleeding edge it is generally less stable than some of the other distributions though it is still a good distribution.

CentOS, on the other hand, is a free, community supported (no paid support available) clone of RHEL. They take the source RPMs (SRPM), remove all Red Hat trademarks (as Red Hat stipulates you must) and rebuilds it into a distribution that is for all intent and purposes 100% compatible with Red Hat.

All 3 of these versions are FOSS and are more orientated towards using FOSS over proprietary and non-free binaries and codecs.

If you want free (as in cost AND as in FOSS) stability then you can look at CentOS.

If you want cutting edge technology with a hint of Red Hat stability then Fedora's pretty good.

If you want the full-blown enterprise, supported distribution then look no further than Red Hat.

Does that help?

[Sorivenul]

Dragonbite pretty much said it all.

I'll provide a couple of links from the Fedora site, as it is worth examining yourself:
Overview (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview)
Objectives (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives)
Fedora 10 Feature List (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList)
And for any lingering questions you may have:
Fedora FAQ (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CurrentRelease/FAQ)

[kaldor]

Alright, thanks. This makes sense. :)

[binbash]

I tried fedora 10 preview and it is stable.

Most stable distro = debian of course

[SunnyRabbiera]

The latest fedora builds actually have been very stable in my experience, but I still dont like YUM or its front ends.
But Fedora seems to have taken up the spot of red hat as it seems red hat is dead at least for normal users.

[Sorivenul]

But Fedora seems to have taken up the spot of red hat as it seems red hat is dead at least for normal users.

For the average desktop user, I absolutely agree.
Some more interesting information (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics) on Fedora usage. I've been unable to find similar information about Red Hat, and the usage maps are broken.

[Marvindreyer]

These links are very useful indeed!

[K.Mandla]

Moved to Fedora/Red Hat discussions.

[Antman]

Most stable distro = debian of course
or Slackware

[igknighted]

or Slackware

I'd put CentOS up against those.

If you really want stable though, it's hard to beat OpenBSD.