Fedora 17 Or Ubuntu 12.04 Lts

[Richard-BKK]

I used Ubuntu for the last few years, but lately I'm a bit disappointed, especially in the less Gnome support. Yes, I know you can add a PPA and install the full Gnome 3.4 GUI, but that is not exactly the same.

I looked at a old friend, Fedora, and with Fedora 17, which comes with full Gnome 3.4.1 graphical user interface, also it has a much newer kernel (3.3.4). A test installation of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS remained with a black screen because Ubuntu didn't supported one of the latest Nvidia graphic cards (yes I know how to get it working), to my surprise Fedora 17 had no problems with the latest Nvidia graphic card and showed up in 1920x1080... not bad not bad at all...

So I'm seriously thinking to move back to Fedora, I need to get a few purchased software packages in rpm, but that seems not a big problem.

Anybody have any problems with Fedora 17, which I maybe overlooked in my excitement.....

[urandom]

I'm not sure you should chose a distro based on software availability (and in that case, what you are looking for is available on both distributions if I read your post properly). You may want to consider what really makes distro X something different from distro Y. Of course, what i think is important may be totally irrelevant to you and vice versa.

So how distros really differ? One of the most important thing would be package management, in that case deb vs rpm (which one do you feel most comfortable with, how often do you have to build your own packages and how easy/difficult is it, which distro have the sanest dependencies handling policy), then initscripts, systemd vs upstart (would you benefit from latest systemd advantages [ http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html ] or is it overkill for your usage) and lastly, the choice of core packages which, in a way, determine the core features of the distro (selinux vs apparmor for example).

Like always, it's all about what you need

[Korv]

I've been using Fedora since v5 and now v17 with only good experience.

(Well, until they decided to go for that trainwreck called Gnome3, but then I changed XFCE.)

Fedora requires a bit more tinkering to get things going, e.g. there is no "dpkg-reconfigure exim4" to get mail going in 2 minutes and alike.

Anyway, as long as you keep your $HOME tidy and minimize alterations of the distribution files I'd say it is easy to switch to another if you would feel the need to.

[Richard-BKK]

It’s funny I compared (Fedora 17) Systemd and (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) Upstart also; your link makes it much easier to compare the two, thanks.

For proprietary software that I use (Crossover, Nero, Vmware and a few industry related) it doesn’t really matter what package manager I use all have rpm and deb versions available.

I read that Fedora 17 doesn’t have LibreOffice in the repro, but not sure if that is a problem as you can easily download the latest rpm version from http://www.libreoffice.org Actually, not having LibreOffice in the repro makes it easier to keep up to date with Libreoffice.org (as with Ubuntu it happened that sometimes parts of Libreoffice where updated which created different version problems)

I agree that Gnome 3 needs some getting used to, but with Gnome 3.4.1. which fixed a few bugs and makes the feeling much smoother. Still I always need to tweak the screen real-estate to feel comfortable. Also a fast graphics card and lots of system memory helps. With Gnome 3.4.1. its much easier to tweak the screen also you can install plugins/apps that help you… anyway it’s better than Unity what Ubuntu is trying to fed us…

[Korv]

I read that Fedora 17 doesn’t have LibreOffice in the repro, but not sure if that is a problem as you can easily download the latest rpm version from http://www.libreoffice.org

It's there.

[fatjoe@lunchbox ~]$ cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle)
[fatjoe@lunchbox ~]$ yum search libreoff | grep ^libreoff | wc -l
100

As for your proprietary software I think I remember all of them have RPM-packages.

But a word of warning, Fedora is fairly bleeding edge compared to RHEL, which could result in proprietary packages having dependencies on older interfaces. In particular if they interface with the kernel such as VMWare.

But if I were you I'd try it anyway.

As for Gnome.. Nope, XFCE's simplicity and customiziation abilities won my heart.

[urandom]

yum doesn't support regex?

also, i can't edit my former post anymore but please read init systems instead of initscripts of course