I see many using Ubuntu. Why? What is the essential difference between Ubuntu and Fedora?
Is it paid support?
Fewer releases over a given time?
A greater number of available packages?
Easier installation?
Can I get a few brief comments? (I don't want to start a flame war.)

you really could find answers to this by searching, but in this case there are a few reasonably key differences. despite looking outwardly similar, fedora is made for testing and developement of redhat. it's meant to make redhat's mistakes for them. As such it's not meant to work, but it's nice if it does. it does shiny things when those shiny things are a bit new, a bit flaky but worth having a go at. ubuntu on the other hand is meant to be a finished final product, designed to be slick and user friendly, a head to head with Windows if you like. so they are actually very very different under the hood. outside of that, it's just personal preference, so there's no point people now replying here saying "i prefer X"... but they will...

no
nope
no, I don't think so
not really

Ubuntu does make some things easier for the new user. Fedora is mostly used by more experienced users, so they don't make too much of an effort to make it simpler to use, and since they don't do that, fewer beginning user will use Fedora.
It all comes down to preference.
For the time being I will keep suggesting Ubuntu to new users. Besides providing a nice balance between stability and cutting edge, it has the biggest user base (Fedora is more cutting edge than stability ). And while this is a pretty capitalist statement, it also makes sense. You are much more likely not to be the first to run into any given problem, so it is more likely for you to find a solution on the web.
It is a good entry point in the world of linux... no one keeps you from changing to another distribution later on.

Positively. It may not be apparent to the average user but Fedora lacks a lot. No Sun java jdk, no jre, no Metamorphose, no spring, no netbeans, no J Connector, no rails, no xml copyeditor, no gimv, no Tea editor, no SMplayer, no PIDA, no Boa-Constructor, no SPE, and on and on and on. I have spent all of the past two days compiling those things myself. Ubuntu has them in its repositories or they can be fetched as ready-made packages from getdeb.net.

so going by what you say, ubuntu lacks all those too then? if you need to apt-get them and use getdeb.net then the exact same is true of most of that for fedora with yum and repo's like livna. looks like a fair few double standards in play there.

I'm afraid that I don't see any double standards in there at all but then I guess that it depends on one's opinion of what it is that constitutes a distribution. Is it just the data on the install cd/dvd or does it include the repositories and third-party sites as well? If the former, then Ubuntu comes far behind as there is no way that a cd could rival with a dvd full of packages. If the latter, then it is clearly the other way round. But if repos and third-party sites aren't part of a distro, why is it then that their contents have .fc8 or .deb extensions? That doesn't sound like neutral area IMHO. The point is, even with updates, livna and dribble enabled, Fedora still doesn't have the the overwhelming number of packages that Ubuntu and Debian have.

Dear Sirs,
I take the point that Fedora maybe an experimental playground for red hat but then Windows has done that with paying customers for years. Ubantu, and it's derivatives promise the earth but don't ndeliver. What's more it loks like a bag of poo. Perhaps it's somthing I'm doing but end up going cross-eyed tryied altering the resolution but it only partially solves the problem. fancy graphics on Fedora may not be a great deal but if you have trouble reading those on others then this cannot be ignored.

Roy.

Put it down to this: Fedora is *very* easy if you are technically inclined (I started on an old Red Hat(7?) not that long after I really got into computers) but with help my mum can use it.
On the other hand I expect that my mum could find her way around Ubuntu quite easily but I never found it satisfying to program on because all the good packages require the internet connection which my PC lacks.

the number of packages available may be more, but that's going to be down to individuals wanting to provide them, not the distro itself. in terms of what the OP asks, the fact that some bored guy in bratislava with long dank hair decided to make a deb file for a pacakge only him and 3 other people care about rather than speak to a woman doesn't change what the differences in the distro it can be used in are. and clearly a ".deb" file and ".fc8" file are different things... that'd be a deb vs rpm.

That sounds like splitting hairs if you ask me, which I can do too. An .fc8 package is not simply an rpm, it's a Fedora specific rpm just as a .mdv.rpm is a Mandriva specific rpm.

I don't remember saying that there aren't any differences. Or am I suffereing from precocious dementia? : P

Their main repo seems smaller than Ubuntu's, but there are a lot of third party repositories that should contain most of what you need. On top of all linva.

I have 3 unofficial repositories activated. Sure, this is not the most elegant way of handling things, but in the end I got everything I needed, and it runs fine.

You are right, Oskar, it does have all that most people will ever need. Unfortunately, as a developer, I seem to fall outside the mainstream and there is a lot that I need to fetch and install myself. Not so with Ubuntu.
You may want to look out with the add-on repositories, by the way. Livna and freshrpms do not go very well together. It's a good thing that they are finally going to be merged into one big repo starting with Fedora 9.

Although Fedora is more "leading edge" than Red Hat, it is certainly no worse in that respect than openSUSE, which is probably not as stable as Novell's commercial SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). Although Fedora may have a couple more issues than its commercial counterpart, I think it is mildly misleading to classify Fedora as an "advanced users" Linux. Slackare and Arch are distributions for "advanced users," Fedora is not--not any more so than Ubuntu in my opinion.

FWIW, Fedora Core 8 is actually running quite well on a new machine for me. My only complaint so far is that its support of WPA encryption with a wireless network connection seems to be missing.