DEMKO.CA

Why I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu

January 2007

Aleksander Demko

After having been a long time Red Hat (since version 3 or 4) then Fedora (to version 5) user, I've decided to jump ship and try out Ubuntu. I loved Red Hat for a long time, and even enjoyed Fedora when they were only ones on the bleeding edge of 64-bit, LVM, NPTL threads support etc. But now, for a variety of reasons, they've been slipping and so I've switched to Ubuntu.

What I needed:

Why I got fed up with Fedora:

Why I like Ubuntu:

Things that Ubuntu needs:

Now, many of you Fedora guys will undoubtedly explain WHY certain things are done the way the are in Fedora, but the point is, I don't care. I've been using Linux (exclusively) too long to have to re-fight the same battles over and over. For every hurdle you put up, you lose a pile of users.

And lets face it, Fedora is more about beta testing for RHEL than free software ideology anyways. I cannot to be 100% free software only user. Unless you want to shut yourself out from the digital world, you'll need to use both while we're in this transition phase from closed software to free software.

ESR

ESR also has a decent write up on his migration:

Notes for other migrants

dumb :

Although apt and its family of command line tools are fast and powerful, I find the interface inconsistent and too spread among too many tools. The GUI tools like aptitude and synaptic are awesome, but the command line parameters between dpkg, apt-get, apt-cache and apt-file aren't consistent.

So dumb is a small shell script to make apt-* more yumish. The source is all of ~10 lines. You'll also probably want to have "apt-file" installed.

When I learn to make .debs, I'll package it as that. But for now, drop it into your /usr/local/bin.