
Omega: Fedora For The Rest of Us - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7450
======
ZeroGravitas
That's a terrible headline.

I find it inspiring that someone in India can "remix" Fedora to account for
the fact that they have no software patents in their country and often limited
bandwidth which means a more up to date install disc makes sense. It's a good
expression of what makes FLOSS special.

I'm not sure how you get from there to the headline though.

------
RyanMcGreal
Here's yet another permutation in the perennial struggle to reconcile the
overlapping but not identical principals of open and free software with a
practical need to deliver an OS that does what users want and expect.

This is the double-edged sword of Linux: the necessary side-effect that comes
from the freedom to create a diverse set of distros that support different
communities' values and needs is the very fragmentation that keeps potential
adopters too paralyzed by the lack of a clear choice to move forward.

Every new distro that doesn't unify the community (and what distro could
possibly do this?) simply fragments it further. Yet clearly the search for a
distro that everyone can settle on is still ongoing, which means the Linux
community _will_ continue releasing new distros.

In the meantime, most desktop consumers will continue to respond by falling
back on the familiar.

~~~
Zak
I've found that to be untrue. Ubuntu managed to largely bring together the
desktop Linux community. There are plenty of other distributions around, but
there has never been a clearer default choice for new users and OEMs.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
_Ubuntu managed to largely bring together the desktop Linux community._

In my preparation to respond to your comment, I tried to find some statistics
- _any_ statistics - on Ubuntu's marketshare among Linux distributions. Maybe
my google-fu is having an off day, but I just can't find anything empirical
(searches for Ubuntu in Google Trends don't count, since they don't
necessarily correlate with installs).

Does anyone know of any research into this?

------
herge
I thought Ubuntu was Fedora for the rest of us?

But seriously, what are the advantages of Red Hat/Fedora over ubuntu?

~~~
Zak
Ubuntu is Debian for the rest of us.

------
callahad
I'm glad to see that there's a need for something like Omega; it strengthens
my faith in Fedora's adherence to its strict Free / Open Source Software
policy. If I ever decide to abandon Debian, at least I'll have somewhere to
go. Well, somewhere that isn't gNewSense.

