How Fedora chose me

[gilpel at altern.org]

I just saw that the "Guess who's right behind Ubuntu at Distrowatch" has
been continuing as some learned Fedora vs Ubuntu debate. Since I deleted
those messages, I have to start a new thread.

Countrary to most people here, I'm not very tech savvy. All I want is my
distro to work. I have a certain age, my health is, to say the least, less
than optimal and, to me, the less trouble, the better.

I tried (K)Ubuntu and Debian about 2 years ago before adopting Mandriva
and, with both distros, after spending 15 minutes listening to streaming
audio with Amarok, I found that, on the next reboot, both my user and root
passwords were changed. Not being very much into security auditing, I
opted for Mandriva because, at the time, SELinux still seemed to cause
issues with Fedora.

Mandriva fared well except, at the end, it would take about 5 minutes to
boot. Glitch or hack, I have no idea, but I put up with this for maybe two
months because, the Mandriva community being less learned than the Fedora
community, I didn't feel like inquiring about this very uncommon matter.


As Fedora 11 came out, I bought a new computer. SELinux issues seemed to
have been ironed out and I also soon found out that it was the only distro
that would install with a correct 1280 x 1024 screen definition. Mandriva,
for instance, never could get me to a login screen. Suse, which I would
never have been caught dead using, gave me a 800 x 600 screen and, as far
as I remember, it was the best of the bunch. There was a time when I
fiddled in xf86config, but not anymore...

So, Fedora chose me more than I chose Fedora. I was afraid that, Fedora
having a bleeding edge reputation, some applications would prove unstable,
but it wasn't the case.

The only serious problem I had with Fedora is a kmod-nvidia package from
testing was installed while I had never enabled testing. How this
happened, I have no idea.

Of course. I've read that deb packaging being more elaborate than rpm,
upgrades are easier. I'll see. I hope it's not too complicated 'cause, for
the time being, I'm in bed 12 hours a day and, on big days, I wash the
dishes.

I know geeks like Fedora, but I hope it keeps working for me too. Though
Fedora 11 worked right out of the box two weeks after release, now that I
have it installed on my computer, I might wait a month or two before I
adopt the new version of Fedora. I just don't want to take chances.

>From what I read along the last years, it seems that integrating SELinux
seemlessly into Fedora has been a painstaking experiment. So much so that
only Red Hat/Fedora went for this venture straight on without
shilly-shallying. Even Suse has pretty much given up on AppArmor
development, whose implementation was easier than SELinux.

People here talk a lot about package management. As the security of the
net is not improving and Linux market share will hopefully be increasing,
I wonder if Red Hat's investments in security will not be what will
finally pay off.

I'm as far from a geek as anybody can be, but I certainly appreciate that
Fedora chose me.