I have only been a Linux user (properly) for about 2 months. I started with a Debian install (yuck) and migrated to VectorLinux (so so) then to Knoppix (pretty good) onto Slackware 9.1 (getting better), Mandrake 10 Beta 2 (uh oh no driver for my Ltmodem) then I got Fedora Core 1.

It's great. It found all the usual things straight out of the box (monitor, video etc) I had to fiddle around to get my USB Zip drive up and running, the same for Xine (DVD's) XMMS (MP3's), NTFS access was easy, getting my LTmodem was 1,2,3 done, and hooking up my Olympus digital camera was an FSTAB and /mnt entry.

I've read some negative press about the whole Fedora thing. But all I can say is I will not be replacing it for the time being (or until a stable Core 2 arrives)

"I've read some negative press about the whole Fedora thing."

I think that most of the negative press was generated by people who were upset about having to make a choice between paying for Red Hat with support (and Red Hat raised their prices) or getting Fedora for free with no support. They wanted free Fedora with support.

At the time that Red Hat split into Red Hat and Fedora I was using SuSE. I started out buying SuSE and ended up using free SuSE. When I compared using free SuSE, with the shortcomings SuSE introduced into the free version to encourage you to pay for SuSE, to free Fedora with no Red Hat support I switched to Fedora.

This forum still gets the occasional complaint from Red Hat users unhappy with the forced choice between expensive Red Hat and free, unsupported, bleeding edge Fedora. My advice to those people is to switch to pay SuSE. Pay SuSE is better and cheaper than pay Red Hat.


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Steve Stites

exactly, there's nothing wrong with fedora, i use redhat 7.2 because i'm too lazy to upgrade but i'd sure use it , no support? not directly from redhat or fedora perhaps, but you always have forums such as LQ at your disposal!

I agree, Fedora is pretty awesome actually. I use it as a piggyback on my windowsXP drive to use the bootloader for my whole system and as the base distro that I know will be there and working when I need it.

rberry88

How many of the thousands of people here who have used RedHat has every used RedHat for support?

I would say not very many.

as a fairly new person to the whole linux environment, I can say that I am happy with Fedora. I used RH 9 for a while, but never used the support. To me support from the company is a waist of time unless you are going to be using it in a corporate environment.

I can check forums or google and have results 10 times faster then calling a support line.

The thing with Fedora that I like is that there's some built-in support RH 9 didn't offer for what I wanted. PHP, MySQL and Apache were a pain to get up and running smoothly. And more importantly, my Radeon card wasn't support natively and ATI's drivers didn't work with it correctly. It took me almost 2 weeks in RH to get that thing working.

A huge smile went across my face when Anaconda recognize the video card correctly on install.

The only problem I have had with Fedora is resolution and refresh settings upon first install, but with some tweaking of the X86Config file, those problems are no longer an issue.

There are still some things that Linux is going to have to cure before I think it will start being a real, viable solution to Windows for the masses, but it seems that with each distro and new release, it keeps getting better and better and closer.

I've stopped using Windows for most part. The only time I use it is for graphics and other programs that can't be ported the Linux without some major work aren't worth the effort.

yah, same here!

Fedora is great. I upgraded my paid RH 9 to FC 1 and everything (Squid, FTPD, Apache, SSH and Samba) went so smooth. I don't use pay support because there are plenty of free helps out there.

i so agree with the stable core 2 comment
fedora core1 has been ah dream on my system
Everyting woks!
i tink i should tinker around with it more to learn stuff but i dont want to mess with a good thing!

Yah I think the same Fedora is just great I'm a noob and now I've configured everything dot my Nvidia driver to install and everything I couldn't do with other distros I'm doing with Fedora. It is so Fast too.

This was a great thread for me to run into...I haven't been here for a while. I have been using Fedora Core 1 on my main machine since November 5th, the day it was released. This was planned, having gone throug the test process on my test machine (I'm doing Core 2 on my test machine now)....and I have to say that is has been fantastic. I have not had ONE malfunction...of course, I'll keep knocking on wood.

As I get more and more confortable with Linux, I find myself using it more and more. Fedora, although it doesn't come "out of the box" with a lot of multi-media stuff, is ready for anything you want to do with it.

Just last night I finally chucked Quicken and don't boot into Windows for my Financial stuff anymore. I started with GNU cash and fell in love with it. It's just a great distro.

So, I know that all sounds a little corny, but that's the way I feel. I'm stuck on it and I want to stay.

So, I'm sure that when FC2 is stable in May, I'll head over to it also and take advantage of the fun latest stuff....

I loaded FC2 on my laptop, It is working well. A few work arounds were needed to use dialup, the Network Device GUI stuff is broken for Dialup. Probably an update for it already, I have not gotten around to that yet.

I think FC1, may actually pass the spouse test.

hahahahaha The spouse test.

My wife will not under any circumstances boot up Linux. Although I've downloaded a series of mods to make my XP look exactly like RedHat.

I agree with everyone. I love Fedora, I recently installed it, and normally when I install a linux OS it's gone within a couple of days because I don't like it. Being a newbie I want something that does what it's supposed to when I double click something. Mandrake wouldn't do this, neither would SuSe. So I decided to a net install of Fedora, this is something I have never done before, I usually download CD's but I thought I'd try it out. I think it's awesome how it just download's the files you need for what you want installed. The only problem I having right now is I can't install my LexmarkZ65 printer. I have downloaded the Linux drivers from Lexmark's site but it says that it can't find ./install in the archive. I know this is probably Lexmark's fault and not mine, so if anyone knows where to get working drivers, please let me know.