It has been forever since I have used Fedora. I think the last version I used was 6 or 7. But it was my first Linux distro that I started out on my Linux adventure with back with Fedora 1.

Back in the day Fedora required a bit to get set up, though easier than Debian at the time. Along came Ubuntu making everything easy and that is where I headed. Since that time I have mostly used Ubuntu or Debian.

However, lately I have been wondering about Fedora and how it has progressed. I will probably try a dual boot with Ubuntu, but trying it makes me nervous as the last time I tried one messed up the other and I was left with a system that would not boot.

I am curious as to what you like about Fedora, especially from those who have used Ubuntu. I am not asking which is better. I think all Linux distros are great and each works better for different people and/or different situations. I am just curious how Fedora is doing these days and what people like about it.

beefy miracle ... spherical cow

Just try it in a virtual machine, that way you can give it a try safely without messing with your main OS.

Fedora is my main distribution. I use it almost exclusively and have been doing so since Fedora Core 1 or 2. It works for me and I enjoy it immensely. Currently using Fedora 17 and awaiting final release of same.

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For me Fedora makes it easy to get the tools I want (systemtap, crashdump, ...) since their folks develop most of them. Ditto debug kernels. The most recent kernels ...

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A few comments on what I like about Fedora.
It is usually one of the most up to date distros.
Fedora lead with SELinux, hence you can expect that Fedora will always have the latest security updates for SELinux.
As it is one of the major distros, most packages are available from the repositories.
I have been using Fedora for about 12 years now, started when it was Red Hat 2 (I think), and never really had any stability problems. I have had some issues upgrading from one release to the next at times, but they were usually sorted pretty quickly.
I think the main thing against Fedora (and a few others) is the short time span between releases. I would probably prefer a rolling distro, but none appear to be as up to date as Fedora.

Cheers,
Terry

Richard Hillesley examines Red Hat's early history and the genesis of the Fedora distribution. With "Beefy Miracle" due to be released soon, a look backwards grants insight on where Fedora is headed in the immediate future here: The H Open Source: HealthCheck Fedora - Where's the beef?.

I agree. Just like with Ubuntu, I think that the six months release cycle is a bit short but the long term support (and Debian stable) release of two years is too long. It would be great to have a rolling distro or one that had a release cycle of around 1 year.

Thank for sharing the link. Interesting read.

I'm not a geek, just the occasional bash script, but I've used Fedora since 3. Before that nothing satisfied me. One of the posts above mentions SELinux. Well, not being very savy on things like that I tend to have a lot of trouble with it so the first thing I do is disable SELinux. I also remove pulseaudio because otherwise sometimes sound works and sometimes it doesn't until I remove pulseaudio. Then I remove NetworkManager. I upgrade every other version and when I went to 16 I found my much beloved Gnome dubbed Gnome3. And it is no longer much beloved by me so I use KDE now. Starting and stopping services via CLI is different, but I finally got the hang of that. All in all I'd say it's still the best distro out there, although a whole lot of people here at LQ prefer Slackware. But as for Fedora? Try it, you'll like it.

SELinux has come a long way since its introduction in Fedora Core 2. Even if you don't use SELinux understand that Fedora thrives on feedback. So any misconfiguration, malfunction or bug you report can make Fedora better. Disabling things does not.

I must admit I am guilty of the same. For me Fedora is my playpen - if I need/want an RBAC managed environment I'll use one of the Enterprise variants.

I decided instead of doing a dual boot to just wipe Ubuntu off my netbook (still have it on my desktop) and install Fedora 16. It was one of the easiest and quickest installs I have done. It was actually easier than installing Ubuntu for my situation.

I am enjoying it so far!

Hi, I'm using Fedora 16 Verne (32 bits) in my laptop (intel T4500, 4 GB Ram, Sis Mirage 3) and in my desktop (sempron 2800+, ati hd 3200, 1280 MB Ram). In desktop the graphics acceleration is very good, the system is stable, this pc is to connect in internet, text processor, to play tux racer, pinball linux and for give maintenance in my website.
My laptop is used to shell script programming, to make a virtual network between fedora, slack and mandriva inside virtualbox and to programming c++, html/css and to read ebook and watch videos (DVD, flv, audio, ...) in my English and German study (I'm brazillian) or in my studies at the Information Security Faculty .

In this 2 machines, Fedora Verne is stable, safe, work fine with my processors, audio cards, video cards (Mirage 3 doesn't have 3 d acceleration in my laptop but work fine with video and photo), wireless fine, modem 3g (olivetti model) fine, don't need a lot of configurations, have good repositories, is light and beautiful (my machines is 3 years old the laptop and 7 years old the desktop (but ati hd 3200 video card is 3 years old).

I need Fedora because my server maintenance teacher use it in class. At least for me it's fine. I use xmms (music), totem (watch video), gedit and vim (text editor), openoffice, qt-record (to record my desktop), seamonkey web browser, filezilla to up files to my web site, pinta and cinepaint to work with image/pictures, wine to run my English/Portuguese/German dictionary, bluefish/quanta plus/anjuta to programming, wxmaxima/geogebra when I teach Math (to plot functions) and, of course, lpairs, lincity, blinken and shippy when I have time (what happen sometimes).