[fab] slashdot rough draft

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 09:34 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> =========================
> 
> Have you tried Ubuntu?
> (Score:5, Interesting)
> by Anonymous Coward
> 
> Have you tried Ubuntu yourself? Is there, in your opinion, something 
> Ubuntu does better than Fedora?
> 
> A)
> 
> Those of you hoping for some flamebait, I'm sorry to disappoint.
> 
> Yes, I have tried Ubuntu.  I have played around with SuSE, though not
> in 
> any significant way for a year or so.  Prior to coming to Red Hat in 
> August of 2004, I had always been a Slackware devotee, and my
> subscription 
> with them is still active.
> 
> So what does Ubuntu do better than Fedora?
> 
> Let me start without even mentioning the actual distributions.  I
> think it 
> is clear to anyone who is looking that Ubuntu's website is in much
> better 
> shape than Fedora's.  Ubuntu.com is clean, clear, and easy to navigate
> for 
> people who are browsing it, and if you dig down a little bit, you can
> also 
> get to the Ubuntu wiki, which from what I can tell, serves a similar 
> purpose to the fedoraproject.org wiki.
> 
> Here's the difference -- fedoraproject.org is *just* a wiki.  It's got
> a 
> tremendous amount of information, and as someone who uses the site 
> frequently, I know how to find what I'm looking for.  But it has a bit
> of 
> a learning curve before it becomes useful.
> 
> Fedora's websites are in a state of flux -- fedora.redhat.com is 
> deprecated, but the killing off of that site is taking longer than I
> would 
> have hoped.  Our wiki gets the job done, but I'd like to see a more 
> professional looking front-end put on it, with the wiki continuing to 
> function as it does, but just ever-so-slightly in the background.
> The 
> biggest hurdle to making that happen -- just having enough cycles and 
> enough people to do the job properly.
> 
> That aside, I am impressed by Ubuntu's LiveCD, directly installable 
> feature.  We have similar work going on within Fedora, but so far it 
> hasn't achieved the same level of "officialness" as the Ubuntu code.
> So 
> that's an area in which Ubuntu is ahead of Fedora.
> 
> I played around recently with Dapper Drake.  Like I said, the LiveCD
> was 
> cool.  The desktop -- Gnome is pretty much Gnome, Firefox is Firefox,
> etc.  
> Personally I'm a huge fan of NetworkManager, which didn't appear to be
> the 
> default in Dapper, but something like that is just a detail.  I'm sure
> if 
> I were to use Dapper full time and I wanted it, I could probably get
> it.
> 
> This goes back to what I wrote near the beginning about the importance
> of 
> upstream.  If everyone is pushing their latest work back upstream, and
> the 
> maintainers at the top level have the time and resources that they
> need to 
> keep everything in order, then most GNU/Linux distros are going to
> feel 
> pretty similar once they are installed.  Which is why I think a lot of
> the 
> OSS "religious wars" don't make a lot of sense.
> 
> =========================

It might be worth pointing out some of the stuff Unbuntu will do that
Fedora cannot given it's stance on things like MP3 support and binary
modules.  They provide explicit instructions on how to install the
necessary packages from official Unbuntu repositories.  They have a
small statement as to why these aren't enabled by default, but that
doesn't make much of a statement IMHO.

So while it might "just work" in Unbuntu, it comes at a cost some are
not willing to pay.  Basically, you can use it as a way to further
impress upon the masses Fedora's commitment to FOSS.

josh