Fedora, whats with its growing popularity?

[Meow27]

look in distro watch, fedora is climbing the daily download rate very day.

whats so new in fedora 11 that everyone wants to use it?

i personally hated the package management and couldn't continue using it...

[LowSky]

It just came out that is why is so popular at the moment.
Ubuntu numbers will most likely sky rocket in the next few days

[slakkie]

F12 is in beta stage and will be released soonish. So think a whole lot of people are downloading the beta and testing it.

I've downloaded both the rawhide netinstall as the f12 beta netinstall last week.

[RiceMonster]

It just came out that is why is so popular at the moment.
Ubuntu numbers will most likely sky rocket in the next few days

F11 didn't just come out; it came out 4 months ago. F12 is in BETA now.

[Simian Man]

Fedora has always been fairly popular, it's pretty much always been in the top five on distrowatch for the last several years. It's my favorite distro by far. I have been using Fedora 12 for a few weeks now, and I think it's one of the best releases they've done. The even releases tend to be more about stability and the odd ones tend to be more about cool features, so I expect 12 to get a lot of happy users :).

[johnboy1313]

Itt uses fedora to "teach" linux too, so alot of those "users" are really just students who have had to download the os to try it out, that being said untill i tried ubuntu, fedora 9 was one of the more liked flavors of linux i tried (right along with mint and cent os). Fedora is alright though, as long as i wasnt using it on a laptop, had problems with it on there

[SomeGuyDude]

Mayyyyybe Fedora's a decent distro and a lot of people are discovering that they like it?

People really take those DW rankings to heart. I remember the fury when PCLinuxOS was #1 for a while.

[Baked-]

I installed it in a virtual machine a few weeks back. I dont see why everyone likes it so much, it seems more bloated than windows!

[RiceMonster]

I installed it in a virtual machine a few weeks back. I dont see why everyone likes it so much, it seems more bloated than windows!

What makes it more "bloated" than Ubuntu?

[cascade9]

look in distro watch, fedora is climbing the daily download rate very day.

whats so new in fedora 11 that everyone wants to use it?

i personally hated the package management and couldn't continue using it...

Distrowatch doesnt keep track of downloads. You mean the "Page Hit Ranking" (hits per day)? Checked it just now, and fedora is down, while ubuntu is up.....

[the fix it man]

My goodness it's been so long since I used rpm, it was good then

and could never foresee any other manager taking over it, still

cannot see it happening even though more people may use other

managers

[maflynn]

Why, because people like it. It's a more current distro then ubuntu typically is. It can be more on the cutting/bleeding edge. This both positive and negative, you can learn a lot more on fedora then ubuntu which protects you and holds your hands to a greater degree then fedora but on the flip side, it can be a struggle to get something work.

From what I've researched, performance wise, both fedora and ubuntu are nearly identical.

[Roasted]

What makes it more "bloated" than Ubuntu?

I thought the same thing about Fedora when I used it.

If I remember correctly, it fills an entire DVD and installs a truckload of unnecessary packages, which also prolongs the install time.

I just remember trying Ubuntu and being kind of surprised at how quick it was and how it gave me what I needed right out of the box.

Not to dog Fedora, but it's just what I remember when I tried it a year or so ago.

[NormanFLinux]

Fedora, PCLOS and SUSE use the Red Hat Package Management system. PCLOS uses Synaptic so its probably the easiest RPM based system for newbies.

[Simian Man]

I thought the same thing about Fedora when I used it.

If I remember correctly, it fills an entire DVD and installs a truckload of unnecessary packages, which also prolongs the install time.

I just remember trying Ubuntu and being kind of surprised at how quick it was and how it gave me what I needed right out of the box.

Not to dog Fedora, but it's just what I remember when I tried it a year or so ago.

There is an install DVD which can install a lot more than Ubuntu does (including both Gnome and KDE), but you can configure what pacakges you want to install from the DVD. Fedora also offers installable Live CDs featuring Gnome, KDE, Xfce, or Lxde. There are also custom spins available with educational software and games.

So it really offers more install options than Ubuntu has some of which install more software and some of which install less.


Fedora, PCLOS and SUSE use the Red Hat Package Management system. PCLOS uses Synaptic so its probably the easiest RPM based system for newbies.
PackageKit would definately be easier for a beginner to figure out than the mess named Synaptic.

[maflynn]

I thought the same thing about Fedora when I used it.
The funny thing is I think ubuntu is bloated but not fedora. Sure you can opt to have all sorts of components/apps installed, web design, vs. scientific vs. developer. You install ftp and or web servers and you can opt to install Gnome and KDE, so if you select packages/options you don't need sure it will feel bloated.

Personally I like the install options it presents to fully customize how I want to install Linux on my computer.

[hoppipolla]

I don't like it either. I really tried to, but in my experience I had a much better time with Ubuntu.

[mikewhatever]

look in distro watch, fedora is climbing the daily download rate very day.

whats so new in fedora 11 that everyone wants to use it?

i personally hated the package management and couldn't continue using it...

The Distrowatch ranking system has nothing to do with popularity or the wish to use it. Clicking on a link doesn't mean the user got to use it and vise versa.

[slakkie]

The netinstall is bloated with a staggering 200mb download. It does have a nice graphical installer though..

[Bigtime_Scrub]

I use Fedora and Ubuntu. I love Fedora. It is a bit more bleeding edge then Ubuntu. For example, Fedora 11 has been out for about 4 months and It came with ext4 and Fiefox 3.5 as default. Yes, jaunty had them available but it wasn't default, I know karmic has it now, but I'm sure fedora 12 will push that even further. YUM is also advanced to the point now where it is about as good as apt, which is saying a lot.

I don't recommend Fedora for newbies though as weird stuff happens on it from time to time. It is great for intermediate or advanced Linux people but for those that know what they are doing already I don't need to explain Fedora for them. they already know what they want and how to get it.

Also keep in mind that Fedora is dedicated to open source, it is a stalwart just like Debian is. Devoted to making a free and open source desktop alternative. Ubuntu says to use a mix of free and proprietary to get your machine working, Fedora does not even though there are "unoffical" repositories that include goodies like w32codecs and msttcorefonts.

[Kingsley]

There is an install DVD which can install a lot more than Ubuntu does (including both Gnome and KDE), but you can configure what pacakges you want to install from the DVD. Fedora also offers installable Live CDs featuring Gnome, KDE, Xfce, or Lxde. There are also custom spins available with educational software and games.

So it really offers more install options than Ubuntu has some of which install more software and some of which install less.

And let's not forget that Fedora offers 700 MB LiveCDs that contain only the DE you're interested in.

I personally prefer Fedora because it boots faster than Ubuntu on my laptop and a few other reasons. The repositories are more up-to-date and it's also much easier to build my own RPMs if there's a new version of software recently out.

Don't get me wrong, I do like Ubuntu though. It's the only distribution I recommend to people wanting to install Linux for the first time.

[magmon]

look in distro watch, fedora is climbing the daily download rate very day.

whats so new in fedora 11 that everyone wants to use it?

i personally hated the package management and couldn't continue using it...

I gave it a try, and personally, I couldn't have had more problems with it. The volume buttons on my presario made the computer crash, and I use them quite frequently. It's also slower and less purty than ubuntu.

[squilookle]

I used Fedora 11 for about a month during September this year: the last time I had used it was Fedora Core 3.

FC3 was awful, it kept crashing and I apparently ran out of memory on a few occasions... and I kept it for about 2 days and then went back to suse, which was my main distro at the time.

Fedora 11 on the other hand was fantastic. In particular, I liked that the packages were so up to date, and even with a full KDE or GNOME desktop (I tried both) it seemed incredibly light!
My only gripe was that Pulse Audio was pain in the backside, sound kept cutting out after running anyhing using sound for about 40 seconds or so. I found a workaround on the forums that was fine for a while, but then got the urge to try some other distro's.

I don't think I'm going to try Fedora 12, but I will try Fedora again at some other point.

[Wiebelhaus]

Because it's a fantastic distribution! Although I to prefer apt-get and .Deb packaging.

[gnomeuser]

Fedora has a very strong feature set, capable developers and a very active community. It is a great distribution with a strong commitment to providing you with the very best technology. I am happy to see it gain more of the popularity it deserves.

[Wiebelhaus]

Fedora has a very strong feature set, capable developers and a very active community. It is a great distribution with a strong commitment to providing you with the very best technology. I am happy to see it gain more of the popularity it deserves.

I concur with this classy gentleman.

[mikewhatever]

.................
Also keep in mind that Fedora is dedicated to open source, it is a stalwart just like Debian is. Devoted to making a free and open source desktop alternative. Ubuntu says to use a mix of free and proprietary to get your machine working, Fedora does not even though there are "unoffical" repositories that include goodies like w32codecs and msttcorefonts.

None of these packages are included in the default Ubuntu, nor come from official repositories. Some proprietary drivers are included to make wireless work, but otherwise, everything on the cd is free and open source. Does Fedora make use of closed source drivers?

I think Fedora is pretty popular and well deserves it, but pointing out DWR in that respect is stupid. In 2007/8 a PClinux phenomenon hit DWR. PClinux rocketed to the first place leaving all other distros behind. Wwas it really popular? Have many people used it? And if so, what happened since?

[szymon_g]

Fedora, PCLOS and SUSE use the Red Hat Package Management system. PCLOS uses Synaptic so its probably the easiest RPM based system for newbies.

yeah, synaptic makes system much easier... right ;)
for me- yum is nice, but slow a bit. zypper is much faster, it has much more options... poldek also is great, i'd say: it's much nicer than zypper, but its development is under (sort of) question :/

[wxnker]

Fedora, PCLOS and SUSE use the Red Hat Package Management system. PCLOS uses Synaptic so its probably the easiest RPM based system for newbies.
From my experience the two easiest distributions for newbies are Mandriva (rpmdrake is dead simple) and Ubuntu. I don't consider Synaptic the most newbie friendly package manager out there. It's definitely one of the best though.

And for Fedora. They are doing a lot for Linux and open source. May the force be with them.

[handy]

Here is an excerpt from a very interesting article on Phoronix:

Fedora 12 provides "out of the box" support for kernel mode-setting with ATI R600/700 series graphics hardware, but it does not provide 3D acceleration by default. However, Red Hat's X developers have made it very easy to enable this 3D support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series hardware by just installing a special Mesa package from yum. In this article we are taking a quick look at where the R600/700 3D support is at in Fedora 12.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar...0_3d&num=1

[Exodist]

Because it's a fantastic distribution! Although I to prefer apt-get and .Deb packaging.
I agree..

Fedora is on up there with one of my Fav distros. I agree with one poster that mentioned the even releases tend to be more stable. I for one always loved Redhat and was a big Redhat user back in the day. I just tend to like apt-get and deb packaging a little better. Hence I use Lenny now.

[dj-toonz]

The only thing going for fedora is, see what's in Fedora now & Ubuntu will probably have it in it's next release as fedora is bleeding (1 thing I haven't seen in Karmic what was in Fedora 11) presto yum download manager

[WalmartSniperLX]

I'm surprised it isn't right around where Ubuntu is. I think Fedora has been an exceptional OS ever since Fedora Core 6. I personally like it more than Ubuntu. I don't see what the problem is with YUM and .RPM. Sure it was slow and a pain predating the builds in FC6 but ever since F7 and current, it's just as fast as APT and has just as many built in features.

It boots up quickly, and it is NOT BLOATED AT ALL. The only way Fedora is more bloated than windows is if you count the fact that Fedora/GNU/Linux comes with modules/drivers for hardware, just like most NIX distributions.

[Katalog]

I think Fedora is a fine distro, always have. It's consistently been in the top five on Distrowatch for quite some time, so I don't see why it should seem so mysterious that it's spiking a little. I used it exclusively for a couple of years before I switched over to Ubuntu 8.10. I've actually been considering putting F12 on my desktop when it come out in a couple of weeks. I also like the fact that their parent company, Red Hat, has quite publicly taken a stand on a some issues that are potentially important to free software (i.e. their amicus brief filing in the Bilski v US Patent Office case). As far as I can tell from reading Groklaw and other stories on the Linux newswire, they are pretty much the only company of that nature that has bothered sticking their neck out on such issues.

[gnomeuser]

I thought the same thing about Fedora when I used it.

If I remember correctly, it fills an entire DVD and installs a truckload of unnecessary packages, which also prolongs the install time.

I just remember trying Ubuntu and being kind of surprised at how quick it was and how it gave me what I needed right out of the box.

Not to dog Fedora, but it's just what I remember when I tried it a year or so ago.

I highly doubt Fedora installs unneeded package.. at least not any more than your average distro that attempts to serve a great number of users with the same configuration.

One way in which Fedora is definitely less bloated than Ubuntu is with regards to translations and application removal. In Ubuntu I can't remove openoffice, gimp or evolution entirely since I have to keep the help files installed. If I try to remove them my Danish translations also get removed in the process. In Fedora this is not the case. I would consider this a bug.

[fatality_uk]

Maybe because Fedora makes connecting to a Windows AD environment a LOT easier than Ubuntu does, something Canonical should really start to address going forward. Like it or not, Windows 2003 & AD make up a huge proportion of the SME network's around the world.

[mikewhatever]

I'm surprised it isn't right around where Ubuntu is. I think Fedora has been an exceptional OS ever since Fedora Core 6. I personally like it more than Ubuntu. I don't see what the problem is with YUM and .RPM. Sure it was slow and a pain predating the builds in FC6 but ever since F7 and current, it's just as fast as APT and has just as many built in features.
......

Fedora is not where Ubuntu is because it's not Ubuntu. That said, Fedora is where Fedora is, and Ubuntu ain't there either.

[marchwarden]

Fedora was pretty much my distro of choice from 2006 to mid 2009. It's a great distro in that it delivers bleeding edge software in a very stable distro. Unfortunately, you do have to work harder to get certain things working that you do with Ubuntu and while it's very stable, it's not stable enough for me to meet my current needs and some of the bleeding edge software wasn't mature enough or complimented enough for my liking.

[AdamWill]

sorry to resurrect a slightly old thread, I poke through UF once a week or so...just wanted to answer a couple of points...

slakkie: the 'network' installation image is somewhat large as it contains the entire installer. if you want to do a real light scenario where you just boot stage1 locally and grab stage2 over the network that is possible, though it requires slightly more grunt work - you have to grab a kernel / initrd pair from somewhere in the tree and stick 'em in your bootloader config, then boot to it, iirc. I think it's documented in the install guide. in the end you're going to be downloading those 200MB one way or the other, though.

Fedora proper does not contain any closed source software. In fact Fedora almost meets FSF's definition of a 'truly free' distribution - our only point of difference is that Fedora considers it OK to include non-free (but redistributable) _firmware_, while FSF doesn't. (firmware is defined as code which is run on the peripheral itself, not on the CPU of the host machine). So, no closed drivers at all, but firmware is OK as long as it's redistributable without restriction.

Actually Fedora's driver policy is rather strict, only drivers in the upstream kernel or accepted and pending merge into the upstream kernel are accepted into Fedora. No out-of-tree drivers, even F/OSS ones, or staging drivers. Those mostly wind up in RPM Fusion with all the other can't-go-into-Fedora stuff.

And Fedora is popular because, of course, it's awesome. see, it's obvious. =)

and yeah, Distrowatch page hit rankings aren't a _very_ reliable indicator of...anything at all, really. they're good fun, not much more than that.

[bigbrovar]

I found Fedora to be a leading edge distro. If you want to try out the latest technologies in Linux then fedora is the way to go. I remember that most of the *new* *innovations* which debuted in karmic i first saw them in fedora 10 (looking at KMS, New GDM, Fading Wallpapers-which finally made it to jaunty- etc)

Another reason why i love fedora is how close it is to upstream. there is very little distro specific customization (beside artwork which blows ubuntu out of the water) things like finger print/ ldap authentications are integrated into gnome (as it should be)

another cool stuff i love about fedora is how close they work with upstream, hence every technologies developed by them can be easily adapted by downstream and other distros. The major con I have with it is that it can be too bleeding edge somethings and things tend to break easily compared to ubuntu. I also found yum to be slow. (I have a slow internet connection so the slowness is emphasized)

[Rambar]

What I wonder is how will the community react when Fedora 12 is released. Will they bash it as much as we are bashing Karmic?

[ZankerH]

Hmm, I'm still using Fedora Core 5 on my backup machine, the thing handles 2TB of hard drives that 7 different computers sync to regularly, without issues, and to be honest I dread even connecting it to the internet, much less upgrading it.

[YeOK]

What I wonder is how will the community react when Fedora 12 is released. Will they bash it as much as we are bashing Karmic?

Yes, it will get its share of bashing too. Every release and every distro is the same. People complain when things break, they don't say a lot when they work though.

[Roasted]

Yes, it will get its share of bashing too. Every release and every distro is the same. People complain when things break, they don't say a lot when they work though.

That's the unfortunate reality of a lot of things. Take my job for example. IT Support for a large school district.

If I'm getting yelled at, something needs fixed.
If things are quiet, everything is running.

Never a "hey great job!" or "whoa that was fast!".

Black and white.
Biting my head off or completely silent.

[maflynn]

What I wonder is how will the community react when Fedora 12 is released. Will they bash it as much as we are bashing Karmic?
Here or the fedora support forum?

The fedora support forum is a different animal then this place and so I don't expect too much bashing the way 9.10 has incurred.

The reasons for not being bashed is partly because the changes are typically larger and more encompassing the ubuntu, partly because its bleeding edge and partly because fedora you typically need to work harder to get some things to work. Especially since they avoid including proprietary code into the release.

Personally I like fedora over ubuntu and f11 is a good solid version. I've yet be able to get boot up the f12 livecd, but that's not unexpected. Even in ubuntu, I've had nvidia driver issues with my mbp.

[Xbehave]

Yes, it will get its share of bashing too. Every release and every distro is the same. People complain when things break, they don't say a lot when they work though.
I'm under the impression, that Fedora is rarely a first distro so people have seen the pain of using others so are not so quick to judge. Also because fedora 11 gets more backports, fewer people will blindly jump into an upgrade when they get the chance, then complain when things don't work, I've got the impression many fedora users skip an upgrade (especailly F12 which is quite a boring release unless you want mpx). Finally they are much more prepared to let release dates slide (not quite like debian), this is because there is no direct commercial interest behind the distro sliding a few weeks is not an issue.


I also found yum to be slow. (I have a slow internet connection so the slowness is emphasized)
try yum-presto and yum-plugin-fastestmirror, they should make yum downloads faster. I've found yum to be slow, but due to processing (presto slows down updates) rather than bandwidth.