Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Fedora 12
 

Now the the Koala is roaming freely I downloaded and burned for my
desktop PC. I've run Fedora (10) in the past and liked it enough,
but does anyone know if Fedora 12 is worth waiting for, compared to
Ubuntu 9.10? Before I lost the HD in my Laptop, it ran 9.04, and
I really liked it. I am currently on my desktop, running a
non-upgradeable Ubuntu.

Since no one else has responded: what are you using your laptop for, exactly? Is there a set of features that is important for you? IMO, the casual end user will not notice big differences between the latest Ubuntu offering vs. the latest Fedora.

I personally find Fedora to be more aesthetically pleasing, and I'm comfortable in the RH environment, so a decision between those two options is easy for me. ;) YMMV. As always, try them both, then decide.

Waves to anomie--what's this FreeBSD stuff you're using, seems to me I've heard of it. How's the pup?

Anyway, my respect for anomie has nothing to do with my complete agreement with his statement. On the Fedora, and no doubt, the Ubuntu forums, there are all sorts of long, pointless (IMHO) threads, praising one at the expense of the other, but really, to the casual desktop user, they're similar. They both rely too heavily on the GUI, to the point where to use a different desktop can break system functions.

Ubuntu's goal is more towards a polished, usable desktop, whereas Fedora is more about testing new things. What usually happens is that Fedora will put something in before it's ready for prime time, and its users that file bug reports eventually get it to a workable state..

They're both relatively bloated with too many unnecessary dependencies. They both have reasonably usable package managers--if you use the GUI interface for it, you will see small differences of style, but nothing drastic. If you use the command line, you'll find that apt is faster than yum, though yum can do more, I think. (But, I'm not an apt expert, so I could easily be wrong on that.)

Fedora's blue, Ubuntu's brown.

That's the most noticeable difference.

Brown vs. Blue, or Blue vs. Brown
 

And the endless IMHOs too...

IMHO :-)))), it will come down to which is more comfortable for
me. If they both run well on my box without complaints from
the box, I'll let features or appearance decide. I do trust Ubuntu
a little more only because I've been using it longer on more than 1 PC.
Fedora ran well on the Dell I had too. I'll try both live
to look at the features to start with.

Thank you sooo much for your opinion....

-s :Pengy:

Heh, neither of us used IMHO. I'm only humble sometimes. :)

One thing *I've* noticed, that is NOT necessarily true for others, is that Fedora seems to be a bit better with wireless on my netbook. (An ASUS 1000HE). It's very subjective, both have sometimes cut out, but it seems to happen more often with Ubuntu.

Both have liveCD's, of course, so you can try before you buy. (Rather than a Kubuntu, Xbuntu and so forth, Fedora has what they call spins, emphasizing various desktops.)

Actually, it's difficult for me to compare--I put Ubuntu on something here and there, because some of my users have it. Fedora is what I use at work (our servers are CentOS, so Fedora is similar) and I customize it heavily.

At any rate, it seems you have the right idea. As for which one is "better", I think the FreeBSD myths page has the right idea on this one. They have two statements, one that BSD is better than other systems, and that <insert system here> is better than BSD. Their demythafying (hrrm, I don't believe there is such a word, but there should be) is, "That is user opinion only.

So, it's not so much Which is better, as Which is better for me? And, of course, only you can answer that.

Hope this helps, but not sure if it did.

Demythafying
 

Perfect word, thanks BSD....

To answer an earlier response, I no longer use the Laptop, the HD died.
I only bought it to connect when I moved to a new city, there is no emergency to replace it at this time; besides, I've seen some
recent acquisitions in his shop I'd like better anyway.

The Desktop is my Primary box anyway.

Hi scottro. :) She is getting old and quirky, but still doing well. I dressed her up as a pirate for Halloween again this year.

Interestingly, I've noticed the same thing with Fedora vs. Ubuntu on my Macbook 1,1. Fedora 12 Beta (so far) plays nice with its wireless (I used it for hours last night), while the Ubuntu connection was dropping every ~20 mins.

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@salmanal: Test driving both Fedora and Ubuntu (with live cds) on your desktop system should be a piece of cake, then. Laptops are where the problems can pop up (especially with wireless and power management).

My first linux experience was on my laptop with (K)Ubuntu. After one show stopping bug after the other, I switched to Fedora 11. During Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 I had numerous crashes and kernel panics. 64 bit was out of the question.
Fedora 11 x86-64 has been great except for when the Livna repository installed a Nvidia driver I didn't need and I lost 3D hardware acceleration. (Easily fixed by finding the Livna config program in the app menu.) Since Fedora devels. didn't intend for me to use Livna, I can't say it was their fault.
Ubuntu has gained a reputation of putting out broken Desktop releases. From experience, I can tell you that that is true. I've never had an Ubuntu server break, though. Fedora has had a reputation as a bleeding edge distro but has recently been gaining points in reviews for it's polish. It's been much better to me than Ubuntu ever was. It's KDE implementation is wonderful and their gnome version is great, too.
I'd go with Fedora. That way, you can get a great desktop with some professional features and a great driver collection. It is bleeding edge but, I don't hear as many people complaining about breakage as I do with Ubuntu. Yum is slower slower than apt, but the average Desktop user won't be using it everyday anyway.
BTW, there is no Long Term Service release for Fedora. Each release is supported for around 13 months and then you should reinstall. That should be no problem, just backup your data first.

http://www.fedorafaq.org/

Might as well add that upgrading, vs. a fresh install, is becoming easier with each iteration. Of course, I haven't done it, :) However, judging from Fedora forums, this seems to be the case.

As CoffeeKing!!! says, there is no long term service. There is CentOS, which will tend to run older packages (still using 2.6.18 kernel), but Fedora support, including available repos, expires one month after 2 more releases--hrrm, I confused myself with that syntax. In other words, support for Fedora 9 expires one month after Fedora 11 is released, and so on.

I won't try this in the Laptop at this time because I will replace it soon enough.
The new OS is for my 64-bit desktop. In my experience, both Fedora and Ubuntu have been good to me. Although I like it, the KDE desktop always seemed a bit bloated for me;
I've gotten used to Gnome. Both are single-user systems, used only for email
Web surfing, and document management. And I do like the support of Ubuntu
a little better, but I don't change OSes very often; once I have something
that works for me, I stick with it. The only systems that failed upon
installation for me was when I used MS Windows. 2 weeks to go before
testing both.........

Scottro11, I will need to do a fresh install because of my
older release of Ubuntu. Honestly, I never needed to upgrade
before, my other system had the "bells and whistles" found
on newer releases of Ubuntu, it ran Fedora. I got rid of the other system
to save on shipping across the country, but this one is
my baby.

I would like to believe that, but like many other users, I have found that yes, it is a problem. Why? Perhaps it is just the ambiguity of the word 'data': when I do a backup, I want more than just my data files, such as OpenOffice files: I want the configurations, if not the installations themselves, of all the applications I added since installing the OS.

Now I realize that well-behaved applications save personal configuration data in the user's home directory, in a file usually named starting with a dot, e.g., ".eclipse". But how many applications are really that well behaved? And what about changes to config files in /etc (e.g. /etc/fstab)? Keeping track of all these is non-trivial. But neither can I just backup all of /etc, since many files there might have changed in the new version of Ubuntu.

I am sure I am not the only one who hesitates to do fresh installes for such reasons. Surely it is not completely misguided to hesitate for these reasons.

IMHO (yup, this time I'm humble) I agree with you. It's a pain, because somewhere along the line, something will be missing, or, even if backed up, not working as you wanted, and so on.

It's a nuisance. I repeat though, that they (Fedora) are making upgrading easier. From what I'm reading, it's actually the Ubuntu folks having trouble now, which is a bit surprising, as Debian has always been well-known for almost seamless upgrades.

However, they all seem to do this now--short term support, probably because of the rapidly changing pace of software. There's always Arch, with its rolling release--that is, any release is simply a snapshot of that moment's packages, and upgrading is (usually) just a matter of doing pacman -Syu and it upgrades without problems. Of course, that's not always the case, but...

Well, the only things I want off this system are the address books and some files.
Because this won't be an upgrade, I'll save the files I want to folders and burn them to DVD. I'll wipe the HD and Install the new OS from there. I can always add the folders I burned to the new OS. Ubuntu 9.10 looks decent; so far, I want to test them both before I decide.

I would never have guessed that Debian has been known for seamless upgrades, since my experience with Debian is almost entirely through Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu support forums have long recommended fresh installs instead of upgrades. Are they no longer insisting on this recommendation?

If so, then I was wasting time to download the 9.10 install CD, since Upgrade manager is also offering to upgrade my 8.04 to 9.10. If the upgrade really works this time, that would be a lot less effort than reinstalling all my apps after an OS installation.