Can someone discuss the pros of Fedora? I'm mainly a Mac user these days but my Fedora 9 box is still running in the corner on a very old box. I promised myself I'd get a beefy 8-core Intel Ivy bridge system next year. I assume all my "build notes" with all my yum installs still work. All I ever hear about is Ubuntu.
Well, I'd say first and foremost, it's a matter of preference. For example, some people just can't stand yum, others love it.
From a technical perspective, Fedora tends to be about 1/2 to 1 release ahead of Ubuntu, by which I mean the software in Fedora now will be in Ubuntu in 3-6 months, and has less "magic".
If you care about free/libre/whatever it's called today software, then Fedora tends to be a better choice than Ubuntu, since the Fedora developers tend to work much more closely with the community, whereas Ubuntu does its own thing.
These days, Fedora uses Gnome 3 whereas Ubuntu uses Unity for its desktop environment.
> These days, Fedora uses Gnome 3 whereas Ubuntu uses Unity for its desktop environment.
This is what convinced me to switch to Fedora last week after using Ubuntu for years, and so far I love it (Fedora, I'll save my opinions of Gnome 3 for another thread). Using yum was very easy after having used synaptic and I was able to get everything set up on my system without any trouble.
You get more recent and frequent package updates running on Fedora or CentOS (RHEL derivatives).
The secondary reason I chose Fedora over Ubuntu:
I can't stand the apt-get package manager from the command line. I prefer yum over apt-get any day of the week. I understand you can install synaptic, I'd rather not have to. Yum also has the wonderful yum-plugin-priorities package for maintaining a number of repos with specific priorities and hierarchical rules for determining which packages to update from which repositories. There are also plugins for finding the fastest mirror and protected the base packages so you don't bomb an app updating:
You get more recent and frequent package updates running on Fedora or CentOS (RHEL derivatives).
Fedora is a little more aggressive than Ubuntu about packaging newer software. That's why I switched back in 2009. It's not a huge difference, though. Both of them normally package the latest stable version and only push minor version updates during a release. RHEL derivatives by design are much slower to update. What you got when you installed RHEL 5.0 in 2007 is, for the most part, the same as what you get when you install RHEL 5.7 in 2011.
For evidence, compare the packages tables linked to below.
I can't stand the apt-get package manager from the command line. I prefer yum over apt-get any day of the week. I understand you can install synaptic, I'd rather not have to. Yum also has the wonderful yum-plugin-priorities package for maintaining a number of repos with specific priorities and hierarchical rules for determining which packages to update from which repositories. There are also plugins for finding the fastest mirror and protected the base packages so you don't bomb an app updating
I don't want to engage in the perpetual package manager holy war, but I will add that apt has package pinning (the equivalent of yum-plugin-priorities and yum-protectbase).
Fedora prides itself on being Free software. That includes their repositories. Fedora has no interest in "non free" repositories.
This is useful if you only want FOSS software. It's not so great if you want to play DVD or MP3 - you need to use a 3rd party repository and install extra stuff.
Fedora is sponsored and supported by Red Hat. That gives them a bit of stability that other distributions may not have.
