Which one is better Ubuntu Or Fedora 9

[Dave Ihnat]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 04:10:31PM -0700, Alex Makhlin wrote:
> They are both different in many ways. I don't wish to take much time of  
> this forum to answer this question. Ubuntu seems to be the main choice  
> of major  computer companies but why? What is so far better in Ubuntu  
> then Fedora 9?

It's not so much a matter of "better" in an absolute sense, as what's
necessary to manage a system and/or network in a production environment.

Fedora is bleeding-edge, and volatile.  It's expected to be; this is
where the new stuff is first tried out for later release in the mainstream
Redhat Enterprise.  As such, there ARE going to be times it's unstable, or
flat-out broken.  It'll get fixed, but it's embarassing to have your web
server or production application server go down until you can get a patch.

It also has an unacceptably short life-cycle.  Production systems
typically have a known and restricted set of business-related functions
to support; once these work reliably, there's no real need to move to
a new operating system until the current one is no longer supported,
the hardware becomes too difficult to support (e.g., no more components
from XYZ Computer Corp. are available), or needed peripherals aren't
supported with drivers.  Fedora has about a one-year lifecycle; this
means a fiendish amount of work building and verifying a new release
in a production environment, and it must be repeated on a too-frequent
basis for most businesses.

For these, and other, reasons businesses tend to gravitate to RHE, Centos,
Ubuntu, or other distributions that tend to be more stable out-of-the-box
and have a long enough support cycle to prevent the churn of continually
recertifying and upgrading production systems.

Fedora IS great for those who want to learn about--and, arguably,
affect--current trends in Linux and Linux tools evolution and development.
I would unhesitatingly recommend it to the professional or hobbyist
who's trying to learn Linux/Unix in depth, or who needs capabilities
that are currently in rapid evolution at the development edge (with, of
course, caveats if this need is production-related.)

Hope this helps,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	President, DMINET Consulting, Inc.
	dihnat at dminet.com