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:

• long term support on certain desktops and all my servers, for no cost. I can't justify $180USD/year per machine for security fixes (RHEL).
• support for "bad" things like nvidia drivers, certain wifi drivers, DVD playback, mpg3/xvid playback, flash, and support for certain proprietary apps on desktops (not Fedora)
• decent repository of free software (not CentOS)
• easy to use and maintain (not Gentoo)
• modern (not Debian-stable)

Why I got fed up with Fedora:

• Fedora is just a testing ground for RHEL -- Red Hat has said this many of times and it sure feels like it
• to many versions, coming out too often, none of them with long term support
• abysmal "extras" repositories require the use of 3rd party repos to get anything done
• stagnation of yum:
  • it's too slow (unsure if this is because it's python or heavy on XML)
  • it's mirror site support is a hack
  • the repositories are too flaky and incomplete (again, too many versions splinters your community)
  • the front end tools are too slow (or perhaps, they're simply slowed down by the back end... whatever)

Why I like Ubuntu:

• awesome laptop support
• apt and its repositories: complete and fast. Operations that took minutes are done in seconds -- this is the way it should be.
• aptitude and synaptic (GUI front ends to apt) are awesome
• long term support in 6.06 (5 years for the server!)
• the community just seems more open
• the polish -- I can actually put non-Linux users in front of Ubuntu boxes and they'll be OK

Things that Ubuntu needs:

• multi-arch support in dpkg (it's coming in 2.0 ) so that I can install 32-bit .deb files in a 64-bit desktop. I hope they do this right, so that I can use the same 32-bit deb files that the 32-bit Ubuntu uses.
• WPA support in the GUI (this is more a Linux wifi API issue though)
• can't libdvdcss2 just be in the multi-verse repository directly already?

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.