On Tue, 29 May 2012 23:17:19 -0400 Chris Knadle <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I've been using Fedora since Fedora Core 1. > > What qualities of Fedora made you choose it over other options? > I'm interested in participating in the development of FOSS. I think that Fedora is where the most important development is going on. Red Hat is large enough to support development in a wide variety of upstream projects which makes Fedora very innovative. It also keeps Fedora users knowledgeable about the latest FOSS technologies. > > Fedora tends to have early releases of FOSS so it is not uncommon > > for there to be glitches and incomplete features. Fedora users get > > a chance to use the latest FOSS, help to resolve glitches, and > > influence its direction. > > Several Linux distros have "beta" and "alpha" versions as well as the > "standard" or "stable" distribution. i.e. this is is a very > interesting quality, but also not necessarily unique. [There may > details of how Fedora implements this that's unique compared to how > other distributions do it.] > Yes, "release early, release often" is a common practice for improving the development of FOSS projects. This is true for distros as well as upstream projects. While this practice may be advantageous for the long-term development of the distro, some users may not have the patience for some glitches that happen. In that case, they should choose a distro with less frequent releases and more priority given to software that is feature-complete. > > > Many distributions have unique particular niche experimental parts to > them. For example several distributions are trying different startup > systems like Systemd, Upstart, OpenRC, dependency-based boot scripts, > etc. Several distributions have different security setups like > AppArmor, SELinux, possibly others. Some distributions have a unique > GUI (Ubuntu with Unity, Mint with Cinnamon). Yes, I have generally agreed with the software strategy taken by the Fedora Project. It can take some effort, though, to keep up with technologies like Systemd and SELinux. > Some distributions > focus on particular architectures (CentOS, Mandriva, openSUSE, > Puppy), others focus widely (Debian, Gentoo). Some focus for a > particular purpose (desktop, server, firewall, LiveCD, etc), some try > to be flexible enough to be anything or everything. Some are cost > free, some cost money. Even the default filesystem differs between > many of them (some even still default to ReiserFS which I think is > interesting). The number of pre-made packages varies a lot also > (openSUSE has about 46,000 while Slackware has about 550). > I think that, from the Fedora Project perspective, the goal is to allocate resources to maximize their impact on the development of a FOSS OS platform that is an alternative to commercially-licensed OS platforms. -- Support the Free Software Foundation - www.fsf.org _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jun 6 - Why the Web Needs HTML5 Jul 11 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 1 - Pimp My Network
