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Fedora is excellent for workstations - not for servers. It's just not stable enough, and the update/upgrade cadence is too fast and short-lived. I've used Fedo

by Alupis 3y ago

Fedora is excellent for workstations - not for servers. It's just not stable enough, and the update/upgrade cadence is too fast and short-lived. I've used Fedora on my personal workstations forever it seems. But, spend enough time in linux-land and you'll find out there's two very different ways of doing things. There's the Debian Way, and the Red Hat Way. You tend to want to know one really well, even if you can "get by" on the other. (yes, other ways do exist - but they are much more niche) So, if my servers go Debian (and/or derivatives), so will my personal workstations.

Shared404 3y ago
> But, spend enough time in linux-land and you'll find out there's two very different ways of doing things. There's the Debian Way, and the Red Hat Way. For enterprise Linux at least. On my home systems I usually use Alpine or Arch, both of which are distinctly unlike both Debian and RHEL.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Arch for the most part does things the same way that Fedora does. At least, way more the Fedora way than the Debian way. I would consider Arch as part of the "Red Hat" way of doing things.
  - Shared404 3y ago
    I see the argument, but I would disagree. Arch moves fast, but that's about all that it really feels like it has in common with Fedora to me. I suppose that's really a matter of taste though,
    - Shared404 3y ago
      Have some time now, so can elaborate further. Yum/DNF are _extremely_ featureful package managers. They have many nice capabilities, a higher degree of logging, etc. However, they're complex and slow. From the UX side of things, RHEL-like distro's seem to put the most focus on ease of use/vring a complete system out of the box. Arch/Alpine focus on a being much lighter, in the UI, default packages, and distro config. I would probably classify Arch/Alpine as their own minimalist family of distro's
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Arch is awesome - if you like tinkering with your system. I don't know if you could call it stable enough to run servers reliably. I am aware some masochists do just that, however. It's wonderful to have a lot of choices within the linux community.
candiddevmike 3y ago
What are you running these days where you need that kind of stability? For a lot of folks, their apps run on containers or are static binaries, where the underlying host packages don't need stability.
- dboreham 3y ago
  The kernel still needs to be stable, and support the machine's hardware.
- Alupis 3y ago
  We have a ton of legacy in-house codebases that do all sorts of things, and were designed with RHEL/CentOS in mind (scripting, etc). Our k8s containers are generally either the build-tool's default (usually ubuntu or debian) or we specify the alpine version. You are right though, for containers, caring about the distribution is generally not a concern.
freedomben 3y ago
This is exactly the reasons I think Red Hat has really messed up here. Fedora has been steadily gaining adoption among desktop linux, and truly is a remarkably great OS. This in turn leads to people choosing EL for server-side because they already know the conventions, packages, etc. That is going to stop. I've been on Fedora non-stop since Fedora 17 (and a few times distro hopping before that) and 3 days ago I would have said there's no way I'd consider switching. But I'm putting serious thought into it. I'm going to wait and see how this shakes out, but if the end result of this is that there isn't a workable free RHEL clone, I might just switch. I don't like the Debian way of doing things, but I don't see any other viable options for running the same thing on both local and server. It's really too bad there isn't an Arch server version :-D
- ArclightMat 3y ago
  Exactly my concerns. Fedora is significantly tied to Red Hat currently, and honestly if Red Hat keeps pulling in moves like that, I fear for the project's health in the long run. As matter of fact, yesterday I wiped one of my machines for Arch to probe it as an alternative for it and honestly I can think of is how there is nothing quite like it anywhere else, so I hope it doesn't come to that. I've learned to enjoy sane defaults and fresh up-to-date packages OOTB! I also had the unfortunate experience of just moving one of my servers from Debian to Alma Linux to match my desktop, but I'll likely rollback now.
progmetaldev 3y ago
I've always found the Red Hat way to be less intuitive than the Debian way, and I got my start on Slackware then Red Hat (before it was Fedora, included with a book around 1998). I see a lot of people complain about using apt for package management, but I've never had any issues. I've run game servers, database servers, and web servers, all on Debian without issue. I've done light administration to CentOS and RHEL servers, and I've always been confused because I reach for the Debian way. I realize that is my lack of knowledge, and as a software developer I have to adapt constantly, so I'm not really sure why it never "clicked" with me.

by Alupis 3y ago

Shared404 3y ago

> But, spend enough time in linux-land and you'll find out there's two very different ways of doing things. There's the Debian Way, and the Red Hat Way. For enterprise Linux at least. On my home systems I usually use Alpine or Arch, both of which are distinctly unlike both Debian and RHEL.

freedomben 3y ago
Arch for the most part does things the same way that Fedora does. At least, way more the Fedora way than the Debian way. I would consider Arch as part of the "Red Hat" way of doing things.
- Shared404 3y ago
  I see the argument, but I would disagree. Arch moves fast, but that's about all that it really feels like it has in common with Fedora to me. I suppose that's really a matter of taste though,
  - Shared404 3y ago
    Have some time now, so can elaborate further. Yum/DNF are _extremely_ featureful package managers. They have many nice capabilities, a higher degree of logging, etc. However, they're complex and slow. From the UX side of things, RHEL-like distro's seem to put the most focus on ease of use/vring a complete system out of the box. Arch/Alpine focus on a being much lighter, in the UI, default packages, and distro config. I would probably classify Arch/Alpine as their own minimalist family of distro's
- Alupis 3y ago
  Arch is awesome - if you like tinkering with your system. I don't know if you could call it stable enough to run servers reliably. I am aware some masochists do just that, however. It's wonderful to have a lot of choices within the linux community.

candiddevmike 3y ago

What are you running these days where you need that kind of stability? For a lot of folks, their apps run on containers or are static binaries, where the underlying host packages don't need stability.

dboreham 3y ago
The kernel still needs to be stable, and support the machine's hardware.
Alupis 3y ago
We have a ton of legacy in-house codebases that do all sorts of things, and were designed with RHEL/CentOS in mind (scripting, etc). Our k8s containers are generally either the build-tool's default (usually ubuntu or debian) or we specify the alpine version. You are right though, for containers, caring about the distribution is generally not a concern.

freedomben 3y ago

This is exactly the reasons I think Red Hat has really messed up here. Fedora has been steadily gaining adoption among desktop linux, and truly is a remarkably great OS. This in turn leads to people choosing EL for server-side because they already know the conventions, packages, etc. That is going to stop. I've been on Fedora non-stop since Fedora 17 (and a few times distro hopping before that) and 3 days ago I would have said there's no way I'd consider switching. But I'm putting serious thought into it. I'm going to wait and see how this shakes out, but if the end result of this is that there isn't a workable free RHEL clone, I might just switch. I don't like the Debian way of doing things, but I don't see any other viable options for running the same thing on both local and server. It's really too bad there isn't an Arch server version :-D

ArclightMat 3y ago
Exactly my concerns. Fedora is significantly tied to Red Hat currently, and honestly if Red Hat keeps pulling in moves like that, I fear for the project's health in the long run. As matter of fact, yesterday I wiped one of my machines for Arch to probe it as an alternative for it and honestly I can think of is how there is nothing quite like it anywhere else, so I hope it doesn't come to that. I've learned to enjoy sane defaults and fresh up-to-date packages OOTB! I also had the unfortunate experience of just moving one of my servers from Debian to Alma Linux to match my desktop, but I'll likely rollback now.

progmetaldev 3y ago

I've always found the Red Hat way to be less intuitive than the Debian way, and I got my start on Slackware then Red Hat (before it was Fedora, included with a book around 1998). I see a lot of people complain about using apt for package management, but I've never had any issues. I've run game servers, database servers, and web servers, all on Debian without issue. I've done light administration to CentOS and RHEL servers, and I've always been confused because I reach for the Debian way. I realize that is my lack of knowledge, and as a software developer I have to adapt constantly, so I'm not really sure why it never "clicked" with me.