[mdlug] Thoughts on Switching to Fedora Core From Ubuntu

[David Favro]

Peter Bart wrote:
> to scan as a user
What???

> apparently I am one of the few who
> actually have suspend/resume working.
Consider yourself lucky.

> tools and
> a truck stolen recently
That really sucks!  If you ever lay your hands on the SOB who did it,
wring his neck!

> So I'm looking at Fedora Core 6 as an option for one
> machine, simply to see how it works. Red Hat seems to be the other
> commercial distro, so I'm expecting a fairly painless install. Any
> thoughts on this?
I haven't tried FC6, but I did use FC 2,3,5 (and RedHat before that). 
There simply are not words for how bad the supplied package-manager
(yum) is.  It is pointless to even try, in any language, there just
aren't words to articulate how misconceived and badly broken it is:
among other problems, it terminates with errors (without updating any
packages) most of the time (on FC3, using the vanilla release
repositories, approximately 80% of executions ended with horribly ugly
diagnostics that didn't even describe the true error), and it is
*indescribably* slow.

There are some alternatives: on my one system that still runs FC5, I
have been using 'smart' (http://labix.org/smart), which works with RPMs
and yum repositories.  It is truly horrible software... but literally
100 times better than yum.

Also, there is no long-term support.  They release a new version
approximately every 6 months, and drop support on version X when version
X+2 is released (subsequently not even security fixes, AFAIK).  This
means that you must upgrade (presumably re-install) at *least* once per
year (realistically even more often) or you'll be running w/o support.

Otherwise, it's an OK distro.  But the package-manager is so central to
any distro, and this one is so badly broken, just run away from it.  I
can't say whether it's gotten better in FC6 or 7, but it's irrelevant:
with every new version, they say they are going to fix it, but don't:
anyone who gets it *so* wrong after *so* long is not going to suddenly
"get it".  Run away and don't look back!