Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

[William Cattey]

Here is a simple metric for you:

Each September MIT offers a brief introduction to computing at MIT to  
all comers, but particularly focused on the incoming freshmen.   
Institutionally MIT is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux shop.   
Unfortunately, most incoming freshmen run what is free, not what is  
supported.

For many years the informal poll, "by show of hands, what distro are  
you running" the majority was Fedora.  Starting last year, Fedora  
took a distant second to Ubuntu.  In the "Linux Stand and be Counted  
Survey" departments, labs, centers and individuals at MIT run a  
significant majority of Debian/Ubuntu compared to any other distro.

Maybe this is just because, like Mandrake before it, there was some  
significant that made the distro very popular for a time, but then  
then it was abandoned and the majority returned to the steadfast  
source of interesting new and useful functionality, Fedora (and Red  
Hat Linux before it.)

My experience, however is:

	Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for large institutions where ANY change  
is bad, and
	where nobody cares about laptops.  Functionality is always a couple  
years behind
	what people find on Windows, MacOS or Fedora.

	Fedora is for people interested in playing with and contributing to  
the bleeding edge
	of Linux.  Stuff is always changing, and it's often different from  
what everyone
	else is using, and it sometimes need a little tweaking to get stuff  
working.  Sometimes
	this is a welcome challenge.  Sometimes it's too much of a pain.

	Ubuntu is for people who want to use Linux, preferably on their  
laptops, and
	preferably not for development.  But also, Ubuntu is COOL.  It is  
easy to get it
	going and working with the same stuff that the guy next door runs on  
the Mac
	or under Windows.  Contributing in the future is a real possibility.

I am concerned that Fedora and Red Hat are losing mindshare in a way  
that a few years down the line will "kill the seed corn."  There's no  
nice middle ground between Red Hat Enterprise with well established  
functionality, and Fedora with bleeding edge functionality.  Well  
there is
but it's called Ubuntu.

For the people already committed to the development community, Fedora  
is perfect just as it is.
But for people not sure whether they want to use Linux, or join the  
developer community, Ubuntu works, but Fedora has issues.

Perhaps those who feel as Mukul Dharwadkar and myself will find a way  
to provide a particular spin on Fedora that will be an intermediate  
stage between Fedora as it is now, and Enterprise such that the  
developer community will build from the Fedora code base, not the  
less interesting, but more usable Debian/Ubuntu code base.

-Bill

----

William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology

N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc at mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/


On Dec 21, 2007, at 5:28 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> if you feel Ubuntu is competition, then you absolutely the wrong
> mindset in place to be an effective contributor for Fedora. The Fedora
>  mission is about being a conduit for upstream development.