
Why people don't use Fedora? - GutenYe
https://plus.google.com/+WorldofGnomeOrg/posts/PuyCtZEp8uP
======
jbk
The question is more: why are people moving away from Fedora, when you look at
the stats:
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics).
Fedora 14 was way more used than any other later version.

I think this is related to the brokenness of the system: they pushed early a
lot of the debatable technologies (*Kit, NM, systemd) that were not really
ready at the time (this is a choice that can make sense) and they argued that
the lack of polish was OK for developers, and moved on without "finishing"
them. I kind of disagree on this latter point, and this is sometimes way too
frustrating (I think the Arch way is more suited on this). And as this is not
a rolling release, you need to wait a long time to get the fixes.

Their approach to multimedia, codecs and patents is also one of the more
ridiculous of the Linux distributions. And that is pushing also a lot of users
out of Fedora, IMHO.

~~~
sgallagh
As a long-time Fedora developer (and a member of FESCo during the switch over
to systemd), I take offense at the idea that we claimed a lack of polish was
okay. Far from it; we've spent a lot of time and effort in finishing up all of
the tools you just described. I gather from your statements here that you
haven't actually _run_ Fedora in the recent past.

Did some of these things land before they were absolutely perfect? Of course.
_Someone_ has to be the first to deliver something. You can never figure out
what your software is lacking until someone is using it. Fedora takes risks.
As we've seen time and time again, once Fedora proves that something works
(and has made the effort to polish it up), the other distributions generally
pick them up and run with them. NetworkManager, systemd, SSSD, etc... all of
these came to Fedora first, were improved upon there and then were adopted
widely.

I keep having to remind people: Fedora does have a rolling release. It's
called Rawhide and you can move any currently-supported Fedora system to it by
running 'fedup --network rawhide'. This will always carry all of the packages
that will become the next version of Fedora. It's fairly stable these days
(not like its early history, where only the exceptionally brave would dare
install it).

Lastly, our approach to codecs and proprietary device drivers is entirely
because our hands are tied by legal obligations that other distributions don't
have to deal with. (Canonical incorporated in a tax-haven country specifically
to avoid this problem; many other distributions simply don't have an entity
involved with sufficient money to be worth suing). We know it's an issue. It's
one of the reasons Red Hat, Inc. is lobbying so heavily for patent reform in
the United States. There are mechanisms out there for getting these tools
(such as third-party repositories maintained by our non-US community), but if
we tried to ship them in Fedora, we'd immediately be sued into nonexistence.
So we have to choose the bad option instead of the catastrophic one.

~~~
Mithaldu
As a perl developer, have some feedback on why i stopped using Fedora five
years ago, fleeing to anything remotely more sane:

You guys actually thought it was a good idea to include Perl, but make the
unilateral decision to cut out pieces of the Perl core just so the damn thing
can fit on a cd-rom, forcing Perl developers in bad corporate environments to
deploy Perl core libraries manually.

Not that you're alone in that, but you and your ilk will always have my ire
and negative feedback to execs on that until you learn to behave and make
amends.

------
rantanplan
Although I use it exclusively for the past 5 years, I can see at least 2
reasons why others don't:

1) 13-month support per release. i.e. no LTS support

2) Marketing. And by "marketing" I mean lack of marketing from Fedora/RedHat
and too much marketing from Cannonical, which has persuaded people that Ubuntu
is more stable and user-friendly for "human beings".

For #2 I can say that I find Fedora more stable(by far) and as for user-
friendliness I can't see what more Ubuntu(which I've used for 2 years) has to
offer.

~~~
kornakiewicz
Ad 1: Do anyone really need LTS for desktop OS? Especially since it's quite
experimental distro so rapid changes and experimental solutions are part of
what Fedora is.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes

I want a workstation, not a system that's continuously having things
begin/stop working

Fix A, breaks B, etc.

I also want to be able to install something slightly older for not so great
hardware and have it be useful.

------
pjmlp
Because Ubuntu LTS provides the right level of hardware support I expect from
a consumer grade OS, for the few use cases where I still use GNU/Linux outside
work.

Fedora was interesting to use around 10 years ago.

Still, my favorite distros back when I was full into GNU/Linux were Mandrake
and SuSE.

------
tannerj
I used Fedora for about six months as my desktop OS a couple of years ago. It
was my first "real" choice using linux. I started with Ubuntu because it was
so popular at the time and I wanted to try something new so I chose Fedora
because it had the latest and greatest software. That sounds awesome in
theory, but in practice I was constantly having things break when I updated my
system. The final straw for me was the kernel modules for virtualbox. I do all
my web development in VirtualBox VM's and when I was stuck waiting for Virtual
Box to release the new kernel modules so that I could get working again the
pain was significant enough to warrant a change. I know that is an issue with
Virtual Box and not Fedora, but I never have that problem now that I've moved
away from Fedora. Looking back, it could have been possible that if I had
built Virtual Box from source instead of installing from yum, I may have been
okay, but I was still not that comfortable with linux at the time. I switched
to Mint, and have been happy with that distro. I really liked Fedora, but if
I'm being honest, I've been happier with mint.

~~~
cabirum
You could just add linux-kernel to ignored upates list, that would have solved
VM tools breaking.

~~~
wlesieutre
I bet some people did. But when you look at the population as a whole, it
probably looks like 5% "I can add linux-kernel to the ignored updates list,"
and 95% "I'm switching back to Ubuntu because it breaks less."

~~~
cabirum
I don't think the problems of running a specific distro in a VM applies to
general population at all ;) Only a small percentage of developers will ever
face the issue, and googling a fix is faster than re-installing whole OS.

~~~
wlesieutre
I don't think anything about running Fedora applies to the general population
at all! :P

I'm sure I'm not a typical user, but I've definitely had more Linux VMs than
I've had native installs. Even if it's not a majority, I don't think it's
uncommon.

------
bluedino
Redhat is all I new since the late 90's. I'd played around with Debian and
Slack a little, but I was die-hard Redhat. Bought the packaged versions, ran
it at work and home, servers and workstations

When Fedora came out, I stuck with it. But it didn't feel right. Somewhere
around FC 5 or 6 I tried to find a new distro, and didn't like Ubuntu for
whatever reason. Too easy. Too mainstream. Too 'brown'. But I ended up using
it, and still do to this day.

Back to Fedora:

There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.

There aren't many other users. Chicken and the egg. The support forums, IRC
channels, etc aren't as active as Ubuntu. Ubuntu has it's own (very active)
StackExchange site!

Let's say I want to use some library and don't want to build it by hand.
Chances are someone else using Ubuntu already has it figured out and there's a
script I can copy/paste, or a package I can install. Often times that doesn't
exist on Fedora and I could make it work but it's just so much easier with so
many other people using it and sharing.

~~~
e40

        There's no LTS. I like using the same install for 2-3 years.
    

That's what CentOS is for.

~~~
rantanplan
No it's not the same. I use Fedora(desktop) and CentOS for servers where I
can. But you can't compare CentOS with Ubuntu LTS. CentOS is unfortunately way
too far behind in package releases. You get a very stable server environment
but you can't realistically use it for any modern Desktop work.

Believe me if you could, I would :)

~~~
jkyle
Which packages? CentoOS 7 is running a lot of the same software as Ubuntu
15.04 LTS (which just came out last week or so).

~~~
rantanplan
Well do you remember the chrome issue?
[http://www.linuxveda.com/2013/02/11/rhel-obsolete-by-
google/](http://www.linuxveda.com/2013/02/11/rhel-obsolete-by-google/)

Also, last time I checked, KDE, which I use, was many releases behind. Also,
in Centos6 which had python 2.6.5(IIRC) was a PITA to update. Actually you
couldn't so you had to maintain a source-based installation of 2.7.X side by
side. In general you ended up having a source distribution, because the repos
had really old stuff. For web development stuff, it was really impossible to
have it as your main system.

Maybe CentOS 7 is a bit better, but still I don't think you can use it for
modern desktop/devel operations.

------
mpdehaan2
People _do_ use Fedora. In particular, it serves as a great place to try out
new features prior to them hitting RHEL, and is widely used as a development
platform.

It has a very fast release cycle, however, so it's not always something you
want to deploy in production if you still want security updates (fine if you
can easily replace your cloud instances though) -- though there are QUITE a
many folks running some impressive Fedora deployments in production, including
renderfarms and chip design clusters.

~~~
craigching
I use Fedora, as you mentioned, as a development platform. I develop software
that manages, among other things, IBM MQ which technically runs on RHEL, but
also runs on Fedora for development. Why use Fedora and not RHEL then? Because
Fedora has the latest emacs, git, etc. which makes it a much nicer development
platform. If I had to actually develop on RHEL I'd probably gouge my eyes out
due to older versions of the tools I use. For a long time, emacs in particular
was really, really old. I think it's better now, but I still like Fedora.

------
wazari972
I'm not sure to see the point of the submission here, the only answer to the
question I can see is:

> So, I switched to Arch after almost 3 blue years. And the only why left for
> me is because others do it better!

~~~
seunosewa
Which is funny because people don't use Arch as much as they use Fedora.

~~~
andrewd18
[[citation needed]]

------
erikb
There is the question and the answer is "It's obvious". That's not a
reasonable starting point for a discussion.

------
api
I used it a while back when I worked at a place that used Linux desktops. I
liked it over Ubuntu since yum/rpm is so much faster than deb/apt and because
they just seemed to give you a good solid system that just worked. They
weren't "trying too hard."

I also like Gnome 3. I realize I may be a minority there, but it was/is a nice
UI that just did the basics well: fast, doesn't look like Windows 95 or
otherwise like crap, launches my apps, lets me organize them, and otherwise
stays out of my way. It supports some nice stuff copied from OS X like being
able to move your mouse to a corner and seeing all your windows, etc., and did
not seem bug-ridden.

I never had quality problems. Installed fine, worked fine. Hardware support
was decent, though these were Dell machines which historically tend to run
Linux well. Upgrading was a pain though. I would basically just reinstall.

I was using Fedora 16 through 19.

------
lukaslalinsky
I was using Red Hat on desktop way before there was Fedora. Eventually I
switched to Debian and later Ubuntu (since 5.10). I have tried Fedora a couple
of times, but I was always disappointed that the system doesn't work out of
the box. I have to deal with drivers, I have to install external repositories,
etc. Ubuntu always just worked and I get a fully usable system right after
installation. That was the main reason why I switched from Debian and why I
will not be switching to Fedora.

------
cies
Personally I consider Fedora to be a testbed for Redhat's RHEL, but honestly I
don't know if this is true. A bit like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases are a testbed
for their LTSes.

With Ubuntu I have pretty much the same system on my servers and on my desktop
(I currently use Netrunner[1] because I want a system similar to Ubuntu on our
servers -- otherwise I'd be running Arch[2] or NixOS[3]).

If I'd have chosen RHEL/CentOS for on the servers I _might_ use Fedora on my
desktop. But in the absence of a huge desktop-oriented community like Ubuntu-
and-derivatives have, I would probably feel a little lonely.

Maybe others are also afraid for this loneliness.

1: Netrunner Ubuntu (or Arch) with KDE and sane defaults (like Adblockers) --
[http://www.netrunner-os.com/](http://www.netrunner-os.com/)

2: Arch Linux, a rolling-release distro --
[https://www.archlinux.org](https://www.archlinux.org)

3: NixOS is to other distros, what Haskell is to other programming languages
-- [http://nixos.org](http://nixos.org)

~~~
Svenstaro
I use Arch on all my servers and it really works quite well. You have very
little magic, very quick updates and generally things just work.

------
arca_vorago
Instead of why are they not using, why would you use Fedora? In my view,
because you want to be familiar with the ecosystem and potential future
changes if you are supporting CentOS/RedHat but want newer features for your
worknix. If the above isn't your use case, I would say Fedora has done some
very nice bleeding edge stuff, so if you are the kind of person who likes Arch
but doesn't like all the manual labor, Fedora might be up your alley.

I do know that I was very impressed with Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2014, until
I realized that the proprietary video drivers refused to work in UEFI/BIOS
mode. A deal breaker because I'm working on Unreal Engine 4 linux native
editor, otherwise I probably would be using it.

edit: Also, I installed both latest stable and beta (22 I think), and some of
the issues related to the rawhide packaging production cycle, so I plan on
trying it again once 22 is out and/or when the repos are updated for it.

------
Rapzid
The way I understood it was that WAY back(which is just a 5+ years but that's
way back in internet years) tons of people used Fedora for development. I
seemed to come into the mix about the time things started swinging toward
debian/ubuntu and now some other flavours.. My take on this is that change and
adoption in the wider developer space has just been increasing like mad..
RedHat is not exactly the platform of the latest and greatest.

Now, I'm not discounting RedHat/Fedora in any way with this but times a
change'n. Used to be years old stable releases were the best bet for
stability. Now with progress in development and testing how many projects
recommend the latest stable release? Other server distros offer recent-ish
packages that are very widely used and tested so it's no surprise to me that a
lot of development platform usage is trending toward these same distros.

------
dec0dedab0de
I'm still mad that Redhat spun off fedora in the first place, 3 days before
the announcement I had bought a boxed copy. I returned it, and switched to
Suse. Then when Suse got buddy buddy with Microsoft I switched to Debian, then
Ubuntu, then Mint, and now back to Ubuntu.

------
jkbr
I used Fedora quite happily on my laptop for years until I bought a Macbook. I
also used it as a production system for my projects for almost 10 years.
Enjoyed the availability of new versions of packages and don't remember
encountering many stability issues. But eventually I got tired of the short
support lifecycle and switched to CentOS.

------
meddlepal
I use it... I'm not sure how people are having all these issues with Fedora
and I am not? I run it on both a desktop (custom built) and a laptop (Dell
M4800). It's my everyday and work OS.

------
gradstudent
I used to use Fedora. I guess it was OK. These days, I prefer Ubuntu. I find
it simpler and I like apt better than yum. Not that I use Linux all that much;
I mostly live inside my OSX terminal.

~~~
rantanplan
Could you explain what you like better in apt? To me it doesn't make sense.

apt-get, apt-file, apt-cache, apt-blah. And apart from apt-get, the others are
not even in the default install(IIRC). Why? Seriously, I don't get it. With
yum, there's only yum.

Plus I think that yum handled more gracefully iterrupted operations, but maybe
they fixed that in apt by now.

~~~
gradstudent
> Could you explain what you like better in apt?

It has been some years since I used Fedora (FC5 or FC6). I remember the
default yum repositories were missing utilities I wanted and I was also
installing stuff from RPM files more often than I would have liked.

Another reason for switching was Ubuntu seemed to have a bigger community and
it was easier to get help (at the time, I was still pretty new). Plus it was
so much easier to get started with Ubuntu's Live CDs.

------
rtz12
I used to use Fedora, but the updating process never worked for me so I
switched to Arch. I am really enjoying the rolling release model, though it is
a bit less stable than Fedora.

------
likeclockwork
I've used Fedora, off and on, for many years and Red Hat before it, back in
the late 90's.

I still have 2/3 of my machines on Fedora. My main development workstation is
running Arch now and I plan to migrate my music production workstation and my
all-rounder ultrabook as well.

Despite moving away from Fedora, I really can't say much against it and little
against it that's actually in favor of Arch or any other distro.

It's a good solid distribution. The only real pain points are installing non-
free drivers and that some things aren't packaged for it. I'm comfortable
repackaging things, doing manual installs, or adding necessary repos--no
distribution has 100% of all software ever created in its repositories.

I mainly switched to Arch because I wanted a rolling release distribution
where I wouldn't feel "left behind" after a couple of years of being too lazy
to reinstall my whole OS. (Which is different than LTS, because I want more
than just security updates and fixes, I want the latest everything, forever.)

The secondary reasons I ended up liking Arch are the AUR and that Arch does
much MUCH less for you out of the box in terms of default configurations etc
than Fedora does and I was getting a bit frustrated with not having things the
way I wanted them while having default configurations that were adequate
enough to settle for.. so I wanted a distribution that would be basically
almost unconfigured after installation so that I would arrive at the
configuration I wanted. In this regard, Arch has been better than Fedora but
that isn't "user-friendly" that's more "user-challenging".

Either way, Fedora is a good distro, I would recommend it to a raw newbie or a
power user. I can't really say anything other than that, it's definitely
Linux. It's also really easy to install. (I auditioned Ubuntu and some Ubuntu-
derived distributions some time ago found things like getting my RAID working
at install-time to be impossible. I use BTRFS now, but I was trying to use my
mobo's RAID-controller then.. which was trivial in Fedora and not happening in
Ubuntu.)

If you're curious to know what I don't like about Arch.. it's that updates
seem like they should be done pretty regularly and I'm not in the habit of
rebooting more than about 2-3 times a year. There was even a year in recent
history where I did not reboot once and my uptime was somewhere around 1 year
before I irrationally became worried that I didn't -know- that my computer was
capable of booting because I hadn't tested that capability in so long, so I
rebooted it and then updated just to demonstrate to myself that it would work.

------
Tepix
It forces me to do a distribution upgrade every 6 months or so.

------
cafard
I use it here and there.

------
vegabook
I think Gnome 3 doesn't quite "do" polish as much as Unity. I am very fussy
about fonts looking right, and I'm afraid that at smaller sizes, the font
scaling in the Gnome terminal just looked wrong, whereas Unity is perfect in
this sense. It's a tiny detail, but Unity kind of feels as polished as a Mac.
It also has better dual-monitor support because you can independently set the
font scaling for different dpi on internal/external monitor. Crucial if you
run a high-dpi notebook in conjunction with a normal fullhd monitor. On Fedora
Gnome I had ugly mis-sized title bars and UI fonts on at least one of my
monitors.

Second, I do CUDA development, and there are three Cuda 7.0 toolkits
downloadable for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 right now, but Fedora 21 is still
"coming soon" and has been "coming soon" now for over 6 weeks. Deja vu a few
times already on this. Moved back to 14.04, even though I loved the
progressive ideas and clean look in Gnome 3.

I still run Fedora on a cubietruck for fun: no problems, works well, but I use
the e17 desktop which is a fantastic retro reminder of the 90s if you need an
antidote to Jony Ive. It's fast, lean, unapollageticaly black, and terminology
looks great and has some neat features for inline graphics if you're a
terminal junky.

~~~
Svenstaro
You should generally be able to get the RHEL 7 CUDA releases running on
whatever you are currently using. For instance, Arch gets CUDA updates usually
on the same day.

------
WorldWideWayne
I really hate the fact that the default desktop (Gnome) copied a bunch of
anti-patterns from OS X, like the universal title bar, no taskbar, mixing
folders with files, etc. I find OS X to be the least user friendly OS on
multiple levels - they leave out critical functionality (while claiming their
shit is somehow better) or they hide it.

But, I use it anyway because it has less issues than Ubuntu and with the Gnome
Tweak Tool and some extensions I can fix many of the annoyances.

------
dschiptsov
All the money Ubuntu spent for promotion.

For laymen Linux = Ubuntu.

