[mdlug] Thoughts on Switching to Fedora Core From Ubuntu

[Peter Bart]

On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 20:07 -0400, David Favro wrote:
> Peter Bart wrote:
> > to scan as a user
> What???

	I use multifunction printer/scanners/copiers on these machines. SUSE
detected and installed the proper drivers automatically but under Ubuntu
it was another story. The closest I've gotten there is be able to scan
as root but not user. I've never been able to sort out the proper
permissions yet. 

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

	Again, SUSE works out of the box save for the documented fix.

> 
> > 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.

	Okay, fairly painless does not seem to apply ;-)

> 
> 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!

	Thanks for taking the time to answer! Seems I hit a button there.

-- 
Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net>
http://petertheplumber.net