Why Fedora ?

[Timothy Murphy]

Benjamin Franz wrote:

>>> I disagree with this statement entirely. Fedora Core is not a
>>> stable release.
>>
>> What exactly does that mean?
>>
>> In my experience, not only is Fedora stable,
>> but so is every Linux distribution I have tried in recent years,
>> as also are all recent versions of Windows -
>> assuming that by "stable" you mean
>> you do not get the "blue screen of death" or equivalent.
> 
> You mean like the recent update to Xorg that rendered many machines
> completely borken unless you are enough of a system expert to manage a
> forced boot to run level 3, locating the old Xorg packages in the yum
> cache and manually force a '--oldpackage' install with rpm from the
> command line?

I guess it is just a matter of terminology,
but I would not use the word "unstable" to describe this.
I would just say "the latest version of X does not work on my machine".

Incidentally, couldn't you get to a text console with Ctrl-Alt-F1?
If so, I would hardly say one needed to be a system expert -
just to have read one or two basic documents.

I have a fairly esoteric collection of computers,
and didn't find FC-4 any more or less of a problem
than any of the RedHat or Slackware distributions I've tried.
In fact, FC-4 is the _first_ distribution for which X worked
"out of the box" on my Sony C1VFK Picturebook
since Xorg started.
(I've always had to compile X with a patch for this machine,
as has everyone else with a Picturebook.
Apparently the patch has now been included by Xorg.)

To me, a machine is "unstable" if it crashes fairly frequently
for no obvious reason.
As I said, I haven't come across an unstable version of Linux
(or Windows) for several years.

I wouldn't use the word "unstable" if a distribution
simply did not work on a particular machine.

In my experience, one is likely to meet problems
with every new distribution;
I haven't found FC-[1234] any different in this respect
from the many versions of RH that I ran through.

I would say that "yum" has been an extremely useful tool,
which has enormously simplified life -
far better than the old Redhat update (or was it up2date?).






-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
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s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland