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@xxxxxxx
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.
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