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I doubt many people will switch distros from Ubuntu to Fedora due only to GNOME 3 because the former still has many advantages (huge repositories, apt-get, larg

I doubt many people will switch distros from Ubuntu to Fedora due only to GNOME 3 because the former still has many advantages (huge repositories, apt-get, large community, overall fit and polish, etc..) and on 11.10 GNOME 3 is a fully supported DE, only an apt-get away in the repositories.

hactually 15y ago
I'm not many people but I did switch for Gnome 3. I miss APT but now I know yum so it's not a massive loss. I've also switched my family, who were using ubuntu, over as well - mainly as none of them got on well with Unity and that if I've got to support something - it may as well be something I'm using!
- greatquux 15y ago
  But why couldn't you just do apt-get install gnome-shell?
  - hactually 15y ago
    If something's the default it tends to get more focus and polish. I probably could've done it that way, but at the time of the move Gnome 3 wasn't in the repos, nor was GTK3 and I don't see the point in swimming against the flow.
    - thristian 15y ago
      GNOME 3 is still absent from the 11.04 repositories (although GTK3 was there from day 1). However, the Ubuntu GNOME maintainers have an officially-unofficial GNOME 3 PPA, which I'm using right now and am very happy with. I greatly admire Fedora's tradition of sticking close to whatever upstream releases, but I don't think I could leave behind the breadth of Ubuntu/Debian's package archive, or the ability to do in-place version upgrades.
      - hactually 15y ago
        The upgrade path of Fedora is a bit clunky. It's basically: rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/A82BA4B7.txt https://fedoraproject.org/static/A82BA4B7.txt yum update yum yum clean all yum --releasever=16 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync I am pretty sure I upgraded 15->16 in place using a liveCD/install CD which was cool.
darklajid 15y ago
(Disclaimer: Fedora user here) Do you happen to know a couple of examples for differences in the relevant repositories? I mean - I agree that they are probably not equal and w/o checking I'd even agree that probably Debian + Ubuntu + PPA > Fedora in terms of numbers. But I've yet to stumble upon a problem. apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?) and yum are ~comparable~ for most use cases. End users probably care more about a decent UI instead of the underlying package format. One point for Ubuntu here, the 'Store' thing looks nifty. Community is too broad to comment. Look at the fedoraproject site, there seem to be lots of passionate people over there (no clue, I tend to live on my own island here). "Fit and polish" is where you lost me. This is just too subjective a claim to make. So - up until this point I'd say "Both are the same". Now I happen to use Fedora. Why? - I was turned off by Ubuntu's polish in the past. Purely personal and matter of taste: * Most early themes (brown? really?) * Crappy release names * A 'better than Debian/the rest' attitude (regarding backports, crying for an 'Ubuntu' SO subsite instead of a 'Linux' one etc..) - I disliked design decisions * Multiple patches (most famous: The notification area) to Gnome just didn't sit right with me. I wanted a "vanilla" Gnome experience * Now: Creating an in-house shell replacement that disconnects Ubuntu from all the rest. * Future: Wayland, pressed forward instead of offering it and letting competition decide if it's a project worth looking at
- sapphirecat 15y ago
  > apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?) aptitude is a TUI front-end for apt-get (which is to yum as dpkg is to rpm). synaptic and the Ubuntu Store are GUIs into the same system, though I think the store is further layered over aptdaemon and/or PackageKit. (I don't use the store much, since I'm used to synaptic, so I'm foggy on the details there. At any rate, the store UI isn't blocked while installs progress.)
  - sciurus 15y ago
    aptitude also has a CLI. For a while it was recommended over apt-get/apt-cache/apt-file because it tracked packages that were installed only in order to satisfy dependencies and let you automatically remove them when you uninstalled the package that needed them. However, now apt-get does that too.

hactually 15y ago

I'm not many people but I did switch for Gnome 3. I miss APT but now I know yum so it's not a massive loss. I've also switched my family, who were using ubuntu, over as well - mainly as none of them got on well with Unity and that if I've got to support something - it may as well be something I'm using!

greatquux 15y ago
But why couldn't you just do apt-get install gnome-shell?
- hactually 15y ago
  If something's the default it tends to get more focus and polish. I probably could've done it that way, but at the time of the move Gnome 3 wasn't in the repos, nor was GTK3 and I don't see the point in swimming against the flow.
  - thristian 15y ago
    GNOME 3 is still absent from the 11.04 repositories (although GTK3 was there from day 1). However, the Ubuntu GNOME maintainers have an officially-unofficial GNOME 3 PPA, which I'm using right now and am very happy with. I greatly admire Fedora's tradition of sticking close to whatever upstream releases, but I don't think I could leave behind the breadth of Ubuntu/Debian's package archive, or the ability to do in-place version upgrades.
    - hactually 15y ago
      The upgrade path of Fedora is a bit clunky. It's basically: rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/A82BA4B7.txt https://fedoraproject.org/static/A82BA4B7.txt yum update yum yum clean all yum --releasever=16 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync I am pretty sure I upgraded 15->16 in place using a liveCD/install CD which was cool.

darklajid 15y ago

(Disclaimer: Fedora user here) Do you happen to know a couple of examples for differences in the relevant repositories? I mean - I agree that they are probably not equal and w/o checking I'd even agree that probably Debian + Ubuntu + PPA > Fedora in terms of numbers. But I've yet to stumble upon a problem. apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?) and yum are ~comparable~ for most use cases. End users probably care more about a decent UI instead of the underlying package format. One point for Ubuntu here, the 'Store' thing looks nifty. Community is too broad to comment. Look at the fedoraproject site, there seem to be lots of passionate people over there (no clue, I tend to live on my own island here). "Fit and polish" is where you lost me. This is just too subjective a claim to make. So - up until this point I'd say "Both are the same". Now I happen to use Fedora. Why? - I was turned off by Ubuntu's polish in the past. Purely personal and matter of taste: * Most early themes (brown? really?) * Crappy release names * A 'better than Debian/the rest' attitude (regarding backports, crying for an 'Ubuntu' SO subsite instead of a 'Linux' one etc..) - I disliked design decisions * Multiple patches (most famous: The notification area) to Gnome just didn't sit right with me. I wanted a "vanilla" Gnome experience * Now: Creating an in-house shell replacement that disconnects Ubuntu from all the rest. * Future: Wayland, pressed forward instead of offering it and letting competition decide if it's a project worth looking at

sapphirecat 15y ago
> apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?) aptitude is a TUI front-end for apt-get (which is to yum as dpkg is to rpm). synaptic and the Ubuntu Store are GUIs into the same system, though I think the store is further layered over aptdaemon and/or PackageKit. (I don't use the store much, since I'm used to synaptic, so I'm foggy on the details there. At any rate, the store UI isn't blocked while installs progress.)
- sciurus 15y ago
  aptitude also has a CLI. For a while it was recommended over apt-get/apt-cache/apt-file because it tracked packages that were installed only in order to satisfy dependencies and let you automatically remove them when you uninstalled the package that needed them. However, now apt-get does that too.