Brunellus
August 18th, 2006, 03:43 PM
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/17/177220
The leader of the Fedora Project praised Ubuntu in his latest Slashdot (uh, would you call it an "interview"?). There was a lot of discussion of Ubuntu generally, but the most interesting part was this:
10) Have you tried Ubuntu?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward
Have you tried Ubuntu yourself? Is there, in your opinion, something Ubuntu does better than Fedora?
Max:
Those of you hoping for some flamebait, I'm sorry to disappoint.
Yes, I have tried Ubuntu. I have played around with SUSE, though not in any significant way for a year or so. Prior to coming to Red Hat in August of 2004, I had always been a Slackware devotee, and my subscription with them is still active.
So what does Ubuntu do better than Fedora?
Let me start without even mentioning the actual distributions. I think it is clear to anyone who is looking that Ubuntu's website is in much better shape than Fedora's. Ubuntu.com is clean, clear, and easy to navigate for people who are browsing it, and if you dig down a little bit, you can also get to the Ubuntu wiki, which from what I can tell, serves a similar purpose to the fedoraproject.org wiki.
Here's the difference -- fedoraproject.org is *just* a wiki. It's got a tremendous amount of information, and as someone who uses the site frequently, I know how to find what I'm looking for. But it has a bit of a learning curve before it becomes useful.
Fedora's websites are in a state of flux -- fedora.redhat.com is deprecated, but the killing off of that site is taking longer than I would have hoped, as there are a variety of infrastructure issues at play. Our wiki gets the job done, but I'd like to see a more professional looking front-end put on it, with the wiki continuing to function as it does, but just ever-so-slightly in the background. The biggest hurdle to making that happen -- just having enough cycles and enough people to do the job properly.
That aside, I am impressed by Ubuntu's LiveCD, directly installable feature. We have similar work going on within Fedora, but so far it hasn't achieved the same level of "officialness" as the Ubuntu code. So that's an area in which Ubuntu is ahead of Fedora.
I played around recently with Dapper Drake. Like I said, the LiveCD was cool. The desktop -- Gnome is pretty much Gnome, Firefox is Firefox, etc. Personally I'm a huge fan of NetworkManager, which didn't appear to be the default in Dapper, but something like that is just a detail. I'm sure if I were to use Dapper full time and I wanted it, I could probably get it.
This goes back to what I wrote near the beginning about the importance of upstream. If everyone is pushing their latest work back upstream, and the maintainers at the top level have the time and resources that they need to keep everything in order, then most GNU/Linux distros are going to feel pretty similar once they are installed. Which is why I think a lot of the OSS "religious wars" don't make a lot of sense.
The leader of the Fedora Project praised Ubuntu in his latest Slashdot (uh, would you call it an "interview"?). There was a lot of discussion of Ubuntu generally, but the most interesting part was this:
10) Have you tried Ubuntu?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward
Have you tried Ubuntu yourself? Is there, in your opinion, something Ubuntu does better than Fedora?
Max:
Those of you hoping for some flamebait, I'm sorry to disappoint.
Yes, I have tried Ubuntu. I have played around with SUSE, though not in any significant way for a year or so. Prior to coming to Red Hat in August of 2004, I had always been a Slackware devotee, and my subscription with them is still active.
So what does Ubuntu do better than Fedora?
Let me start without even mentioning the actual distributions. I think it is clear to anyone who is looking that Ubuntu's website is in much better shape than Fedora's. Ubuntu.com is clean, clear, and easy to navigate for people who are browsing it, and if you dig down a little bit, you can also get to the Ubuntu wiki, which from what I can tell, serves a similar purpose to the fedoraproject.org wiki.
Here's the difference -- fedoraproject.org is *just* a wiki. It's got a tremendous amount of information, and as someone who uses the site frequently, I know how to find what I'm looking for. But it has a bit of a learning curve before it becomes useful.
Fedora's websites are in a state of flux -- fedora.redhat.com is deprecated, but the killing off of that site is taking longer than I would have hoped, as there are a variety of infrastructure issues at play. Our wiki gets the job done, but I'd like to see a more professional looking front-end put on it, with the wiki continuing to function as it does, but just ever-so-slightly in the background. The biggest hurdle to making that happen -- just having enough cycles and enough people to do the job properly.
That aside, I am impressed by Ubuntu's LiveCD, directly installable feature. We have similar work going on within Fedora, but so far it hasn't achieved the same level of "officialness" as the Ubuntu code. So that's an area in which Ubuntu is ahead of Fedora.
I played around recently with Dapper Drake. Like I said, the LiveCD was cool. The desktop -- Gnome is pretty much Gnome, Firefox is Firefox, etc. Personally I'm a huge fan of NetworkManager, which didn't appear to be the default in Dapper, but something like that is just a detail. I'm sure if I were to use Dapper full time and I wanted it, I could probably get it.
This goes back to what I wrote near the beginning about the importance of upstream. If everyone is pushing their latest work back upstream, and the maintainers at the top level have the time and resources that they need to keep everything in order, then most GNU/Linux distros are going to feel pretty similar once they are installed. Which is why I think a lot of the OSS "religious wars" don't make a lot of sense.