On 1/7/20 11:14 AM, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
I'm far from having a satisfactory response to that, but I see two fronts here. First, marketing. How does Ubuntu managed to be so popular among less-experienced Linux users? I'm not sure, but I suspect that good marketing has something to do with it.
I can think of several reasons that are important to me; some of them were addressed by Fedora and are no longer relevant, but they gave Ubuntu enough momentum to last
- Ubuntu provides LTS releases, so people can chose to install and forget. Yes, it is a tradeoff with new/shiny, but it's nice to have this option for something that is intended to last.
- as the result of the momentum, Ubuntu became the default in various special circumstances: Jupyter notebooks, WSL, etc.; furthermore, this popularity attracted packagers so that some Ubuntu packages lead Fedora (see also next point).
- Ubuntu was pragmatic and compromising on non-free software such as codecs and video drivers; as a result, it has sometimes better support for things like CUDA software, video/multimedia, etc., even though nowadays Fedora has practically out-of-box support for these.
Regarding the first point, the Fedora/Redhat/CentOS environment requires an early decision and commitment to one of the three alternatives. If it is production, one would deploy paid-support RedHat; less critical but still long-term roles call for CentOS, and of course Fedora is best for personal systems, especially for development and testing new software stacks.
It turns out, however, that the initial intent often changes: an important production system becomes a less-critical legacy, or a cutting-edge development system proves itself and becomes production. In these cases it would be nice to transition smoothly between the choices: a RHEL system that comes off its entitlement should not just sit there unpatched but should smoothly transition to CentOS, and maybe there could be a way to transition a no-longer supported Fedora to a roughly-equivalent RedHat/CentOS. I realize that this is a big ask, but I wished for it often enough that I thought I'd put it out here for consideration, especially in the context of competing with Ubuntu.
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