On 1/15/20 8:33 PM, Przemek Klosowski via devel wrote:
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.
One of their primary aims has been user friendliness. Their forums are
helpful and it is easier to find information on Ubuntu with a quick
internet search. A number of other linux distributions now aim to be
friendly to those who just want things to work.
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.
Fedora is positioned somewhere in between Debian and Ubuntu. Debian does
not have as many users as Ubuntu. Cent OS is available for 10 years, but
is mostly considered a server distro, though is also very capable
desktop as many of the things in Fedora can be used in Cent OS or easily
ported to it.
- 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).
Having software packages is helpful. However, things like Flatpak, Snap
and Appimages may make this less of a concern. Some distributions allow
using package repositories from other distributions, for example Puppy
dog linux can use Ubuntu repositories, so with a small number of core
developers can offer many applications.
- 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.
It is helpful to know when non-free software is used. Perhaps better
communication with hardware vendors is required. Alternatively, a number
of distributions do have online stores where you can get a pre-installed
system that should be hassle free. Part of the attraction of linux is
the freedom to configure things yourself which requires an investment
of time.
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.
This mostly needs a good partitioning of the file system and/or multiple
hard drives, separate, data from the operating system and the
applications. It is then possible to easily change the operating system.
It is also possible to have workstations with multiple operating system
boot options.
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.
This can work by separating data from operating system. Main problem
might be that some software package may need to be built again since it
may not be available in the repository - this would likely need some
developer/packager time. Transitioning may be challenging to fully
automate due to application software availability and compatibility,
though many linux installers now give a choice of where to put the
operating system and what disks/partitions to leave untouched.
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