4 ms·

Ongoing stability leaves a lot to be desired with Fedora. The utter disregard for bug reports and general aggression towards pushing untested bleeding edge brok

Ongoing stability leaves a lot to be desired with Fedora. The utter disregard for bug reports and general aggression towards pushing untested bleeding edge broken updates with no equivalent of Ubuntu LTS means I'll stick to Ubuntu for a long time. I even donated to them recently.

rwmj 11y ago
CentOS is the "long term support" version of Fedora. RHEL / CentOS 7.0 was forked from Fedora 18/19. It is supported for 10 years.
- blinkingled 11y ago
  For servers that is fine - try installing CentOS on your newer laptop or workstation. Even if you did get it to install, the s/w stack is way too outdated. Between that and Fedora being the extreme, Ubuntu LTS is a well balanced choice for workstation/laptops - you get stack refreshes periodically with point releases and it is not so bleeding edge as to be unusable.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    Internally Red Hat gives every employee a laptop running RHEL 7 (it was RHEL 6 until quite recently). Also RHEL 7 version numbers don't necessarily reflect the upstream version of the software, since Red Hat actively backports major features and fixes.
  - jvoorhis 11y ago
    I've found CentOS 7 to be remarkably stable in recent laptop configurations. Main issues encountered were the odd package with hacky systemd integration.
  - cozzyd 11y ago
    EL7 is fairly up to date, I have no trouble running it on my workstation at work. EPEL helps too.
teh_klev 11y ago
Fedora is considered the bleeding edge of Redhat distros. Always has been. If you want stability and long term support then consider CentOS or Scientific Linux. That said, the last seven Fedora releases have been totally stable for me both running inside Virtualbox and on bog standard Dell hardware with nvidia GeForce GPU's. I guess YMMV depending on how exotic your hardware is, but that's my general experience with Linux full stop (or any desktop OS for that matter, Windows too).
- blinkingled 11y ago
  Yeah, I am an old timer when it comes to Linux and so am perfectly aware of it all. CentOS or derivatives don't support recent hardware, has _way_ too outdated s/w stacks and so it's something you use on servers, not laptops or workstations. On the other hand Fedora is so bleeding edge and broken that it is pointless. Ubuntu/LTS supports most hardware without all the instability and I was merely pointing out that there isn't such an option with Fedora and many people find that a non starter.
  - teh_klev 11y ago
    Apologies if I came across as a wee bit patronising didn't mean to, I too am an old timer and been around the distro block more times than I can remember. I settled on CentOS and Fedora because I mostly buy Dell kit and by and large it's always worked with little or no fuss, even brand new laptops which are often a friction point. CentOS is also our production distro at work, so it makes sense for me. That said I've built a brand new machine from components (Core i5 Devil's Canyon on an Asus Z97-K mobo with an Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card - not exactly bleeding edge, but still fairly new spec -wise for me) so I'm going to see how well CentOS & Fedora get on with that.
    - blinkingled 11y ago
      Yeah, it's better now a days with CentOS 7.x releases than it was with the 6.x ones when it comes to hardware support - but I still had issues for example with suspend/resume not working and Virt manager having issues because the Haswell Xeons weren't tested with Centos 7. Minor issues but for desktop you prefer something that works great.
mattdm 11y ago
I don't think "utter disregard for bug reports" paints an accurate picture. Remember, the vast majority of packages are maintained by volunteers, with different day jobs. (This is often true even for those with @redhat.com email — their day job is usually RHEL or OpenStack or OpenShift, and Fedora may or may not be part of that.) So, response time, attitude, and even expertise available to fix the issue varies. For some packages, you'll get great response (ever tried to file a bug against SELinux? I'd be surprised if your issue wasn't fixed in a magically small window, because those people are crazy awesome and on top of it). For others... well, yeah. Many packagers aren't even coders — they're sysadmins or end-users who needed the software packaged up — and if the bug is in the upstream code rather than the _packaging_, they may not be properly qualified. They _should_ help the user negotiate the process of getting a fix from upstream, but sometimes that's hard too when the packager can't reproduce. For some packages, bugs are a firehose. Triaging alone can be a full-time job. We've had some efforts at triage teams, but those have generally died out due to burnout. (Help wanted if you have any ideas, though.)

rwmj 11y ago

CentOS is the "long term support" version of Fedora. RHEL / CentOS 7.0 was forked from Fedora 18/19. It is supported for 10 years.

blinkingled 11y ago
For servers that is fine - try installing CentOS on your newer laptop or workstation. Even if you did get it to install, the s/w stack is way too outdated. Between that and Fedora being the extreme, Ubuntu LTS is a well balanced choice for workstation/laptops - you get stack refreshes periodically with point releases and it is not so bleeding edge as to be unusable.
- rwmj 11y ago
  Internally Red Hat gives every employee a laptop running RHEL 7 (it was RHEL 6 until quite recently). Also RHEL 7 version numbers don't necessarily reflect the upstream version of the software, since Red Hat actively backports major features and fixes.
- jvoorhis 11y ago
  I've found CentOS 7 to be remarkably stable in recent laptop configurations. Main issues encountered were the odd package with hacky systemd integration.
- cozzyd 11y ago
  EL7 is fairly up to date, I have no trouble running it on my workstation at work. EPEL helps too.

teh_klev 11y ago

Fedora is considered the bleeding edge of Redhat distros. Always has been. If you want stability and long term support then consider CentOS or Scientific Linux. That said, the last seven Fedora releases have been totally stable for me both running inside Virtualbox and on bog standard Dell hardware with nvidia GeForce GPU's. I guess YMMV depending on how exotic your hardware is, but that's my general experience with Linux full stop (or any desktop OS for that matter, Windows too).

blinkingled 11y ago
Yeah, I am an old timer when it comes to Linux and so am perfectly aware of it all. CentOS or derivatives don't support recent hardware, has _way_ too outdated s/w stacks and so it's something you use on servers, not laptops or workstations. On the other hand Fedora is so bleeding edge and broken that it is pointless. Ubuntu/LTS supports most hardware without all the instability and I was merely pointing out that there isn't such an option with Fedora and many people find that a non starter.
- teh_klev 11y ago
  Apologies if I came across as a wee bit patronising didn't mean to, I too am an old timer and been around the distro block more times than I can remember. I settled on CentOS and Fedora because I mostly buy Dell kit and by and large it's always worked with little or no fuss, even brand new laptops which are often a friction point. CentOS is also our production distro at work, so it makes sense for me. That said I've built a brand new machine from components (Core i5 Devil's Canyon on an Asus Z97-K mobo with an Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card - not exactly bleeding edge, but still fairly new spec -wise for me) so I'm going to see how well CentOS & Fedora get on with that.
  - blinkingled 11y ago
    Yeah, it's better now a days with CentOS 7.x releases than it was with the 6.x ones when it comes to hardware support - but I still had issues for example with suspend/resume not working and Virt manager having issues because the Haswell Xeons weren't tested with Centos 7. Minor issues but for desktop you prefer something that works great.

mattdm 11y ago

I don't think "utter disregard for bug reports" paints an accurate picture. Remember, the vast majority of packages are maintained by volunteers, with different day jobs. (This is often true even for those with @redhat.com email — their day job is usually RHEL or OpenStack or OpenShift, and Fedora may or may not be part of that.) So, response time, attitude, and even expertise available to fix the issue varies. For some packages, you'll get great response (ever tried to file a bug against SELinux? I'd be surprised if your issue wasn't fixed in a magically small window, because those people are crazy awesome and on top of it). For others... well, yeah. Many packagers aren't even coders — they're sysadmins or end-users who needed the software packaged up — and if the bug is in the upstream code rather than the _packaging_, they may not be properly qualified. They _should_ help the user negotiate the process of getting a fix from upstream, but sometimes that's hard too when the packager can't reproduce. For some packages, bugs are a firehose. Triaging alone can be a full-time job. We've had some efforts at triage teams, but those have generally died out due to burnout. (Help wanted if you have any ideas, though.)