Guess who's right behind Ubuntu at Distrowatch

[Tom Horsley]

> > ... And they use
> > deb-packages - there's no yum.

They guys who have to actually package up our software at work
consider that an advantage. From the practical complications
involved in packaging, they say deb packages are infinitely
easier to understand and generate than rpms.

> Fedora on the other hand encourages the use of potentially powerful
> admin tools. We use polkit instead to keep track of the permissions.

If only fedora would tell polkit that the answer to any question like
"Can root do this?" is yes :-). (Someone posted the config file
gimmick to do that and my life got much simpler, but I have
no idea why it isn't the default).

There are plenty of other confusing sysdamin differences. For
instance, when installing NIS, you have to manually add the
magic +::::: entry to /etc/passwd. There are basically no
runlevels, everything is runlevel 2, and you disable gdm by
disabling the gdm /etc/init.d script. No chkconfig tool
(some other toll who's name I forget instead). No ifcfg-eth0
scripts, just one big "interfaces" file with all interfaces
defined in the same file, etc.

Then there is the "synaptic" tool, which makes all fedora gui update
tools look like something scraped off the bottom of a bridge :-(.
Since doing updates is a common operation visible to all users
across all distros, I've always suspected that synaptic was
the primary reason ubuntu was somewhat more popular.