Using Fedora, I've found that I've had to compile much of the software I use. As is often the case in linux, the official repos are not able to cover the breadth of software available on the internet. Ubuntu mitigates this problem by offering PPAs for a lot of software not found in the repos. Unfortunately, Fedora has no such thing as far as I'm aware.

After any install of Fedora I have to do at least:
groupinstall X Develpment and Development Tools
install SDL*-devel
install gtk+,1.2,2-devel, qt4-devel
install alsa,pulseaudio,openal development
install Opengl development libraries
install libavcodec (out of date)
install Compression and Font Development libraries
install other toolkit libraries

These are pretty much the bare minimum I need to get any basic software compiled. And much of the time, I also need all of the 32bit versions of the files as well. Of course I still have a 90% failure rate.

What am I supposed to do?

Maybe you should think about switching? Try LFS ( come over to the dark side ), once you've 'rolled your own' you'll never look back!

At a guess because Fedora is a moving target. No sooner has it come out than a change has been made and things are different. Also, I think it's more likely a novice would be using Ubuntu and a lot of the PPAs seem to be set up for novices.
Personally I'm a bit cautious of PPAs and when I'm dealing with a third party application I'd rather either use a proper repository like VirtualBox where it's generally OK to use the repo for the last version (as I do with Debian), install from a tar.gz (like Firefox) or use a distro-specific package which, again, you can generally use one meant for an older distro as is the case for Google Earth.

The amount i've used Fedora is minimal so i'm not certain on this; but i was under the impression Fedora had a decent sized repo.
Do you mean to say all these packages you desire aren't available? or the specific version of a package isn't?

Although similar, these are two quite different things.

what are you compiling from source.

do you enable rpmfusion.org repos ?

Look here
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories
http://rpmfusion.org/FedoraThirdPartyRepos
and here
http://pkgs.org/search/

You must be using some very strange things if you can't find them anywhere!

Do you install from the live disk? If you get the full disk, that will install all the basic compilation tools; it will also do an update on the last version.

I've actually tried LFS as it would be the ideal system but a few things prevent me:

Well first, I did try to setup the tool chain to build the packages but I ran into an error early on when compiling gcc and couldn't find a resolution. I'm guessing it might have had to do with my host environment?

Then the major problem would be package management and dependency resolution. I read the few ways they suggest managing packages and none of them sound that practical. Then, even if you can track your packages, you still have to be able to track down all their dependencies and whatever other dependencies the dependencies need. On top of all that you need to do this while making sure you have no conflicts in version numbers and that nothing breaks.

So, I would prefer the LFS way and simply get all my software from the internet from the authors themselves. But I would still run into the same problems as on a regular distro where older packages I want conflict with newer ones and the only solution is to end up editing the source code or breaking things.

I have enabled the 3rd party repositories which are useful for Nvidia drivers but haven't used them for much else. Then there's the chromium and flash repositories that are also useful.

At the moment I'm interested mostly in projects that have rapid development, such as emulators. Usually for Windows, they will have nightly builds of the software, and perhaps a PPA for ubuntu but nothing for Fedora, which is where all the compiling comes in.

Also, CDEmu is one program that I find essential that I can only ever get to install on Ubuntu because of the PPA. I got it to compile once on like Fedora 13 or something but never since.

What I use the official repos for almost entirely is, like I said, installing development libraries to install other software not in the repos.

I don't mind performing extra steps to get things working, but I have to know that they will eventually work and not become lost in some time sink. I don't mind installing extra libraries from somewhere because that isn't hard, assuming they come from the repos.

edit: I do appreciate that I could install OSSv4 on Fedora without having to modify the kernel. Of course, I had to compile it but whatever.

edit: If I were to use something else it would probably Arch for a few reasons:
Arch Wiki - I use it the most even not on Arch
Arch User Repos
Arch Build System


There is a surprisingly high amount of software in the AUR, and of the packages I have come across, they installed easily. I guess I'd prefer a distribution that has a company behind it that is successful, which at the moment, only seems to be RedHat. I'm not really sure how the others make money.

Have you looked at Slackware Current? It has a package manager with manual dependency resolution (and, I think, some automatic if you really want) as well as people like Alien Bob making slackbuilds of other software. You've no dependency hell breaking things and you can, if you need to, have older and newer libraries side-by-side in some cases or sort things out yourself with simlinks -- the main thing being you do it not a package manager.
I'm too lazy to make the leap at present but if I move from Sid it's the way I'd go.

I used to use Slackware and I learned a LOT about linux from it I then went to LFS which is pretty stable and pain free when using Slackware or LFS itself as the host system.
Most problems on LFS are from people not using a compliant host ( or at least not making their host compliant ), but there is a script to check that , unfortunatly once you start 'rolling your own' you really will never go back to a pre-compiled distro.

I thought about trying slack but having no dependency resolution does not seem like fun. If Slackware is somehow better for compiling, which I don't know why it would be, I could try it. I'm assuming it comes with all the same libraries that any other distro comes with?

Otherwise I might as well use Arch unless the slackbuilds offer more than the AUR.

My experience of Slackware is fairly limited and my experience with Arch close to zero so I can't make a comparison. I can say that for the most common software either Slackware has the dependencies already or somebody's sorted it for you. The reason I would recommend it over, say, Debian if you're compiling a lot of your applications is that you'll find everything where it ought to be and things won't be moved the next time you apt-get. I'd expect it's similar with Fedora as it's not dissimilar to Sid.

Good reasons. I'd also like to add that the Official (i think) Debian stance on installing software from source, is don't. They suggest creating or back porting a package instead.

Slackware has a tool called makepkg; and when you compile from source, you basically run this little tool instead of make, and it'll make a Slackware package just as easy as compiling from source, and then you have the benefits of installing from source and a package manager.

I'm mostly concerned about what's going to happen when switching to Wayland. Apparenlty, the clients are going to have control over evdev devices? So that means, you have to rely on GTK or Qt to configure your mouse, keyboard, or touchpad? How are you going to configure stuff if you don't run a desktop environment with the Xserver gone? Since Fedora is switching fairly soon I'm worried about not being able to use my current evdev settings.

Having your desktop settings be dictated by the toolkit it uses seems not very good.

Fedora is such a FAST MOVING TARGET it is a bit HARD to do so
also fedora uses the newest and sometimes bata testing version of Gcc
and THAT ALONE will cause BIG problems

you will need to keep a separate SVN build fork JUST for the changes that the VERY VERY new version of gcc will require

Gcc is not the only issue
but other versions of software
-- from a few versions back , this problem
libpng 15 VS linpng 12b / 13

code was deprecated in the newer png lib , this required hacking almost every program that used libpng on fedora


and you will need to rebuild the rpm every week or so for the many many many updates fedora gets

keeping a rpm in a repo up to date is a LOT of work , and i mean A LOT OF WORK

# 1 .
Please show some examples. Failure rate should be ~2%.


Remark : Old software may compile with e.g. gcc34/g++34 :
# yum install compat-gcc-34-c++

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