Re: linux for beginners

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:40:45 +0000, johnny bobby bee wrote:

General Schvantzkopf wrote:
Ubuntu is probably the best choice for you, it's very Windows like
(which is one of the things that I hate about it, but you'll probably
see that as a feature). I personally prefer Fedora

I probably shouldn't bother, but I am curious. What the hell is really
the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora with Gnome? To a newbie, they'd
appear to look and work almost exactly the same. And yes, Ubuntu
slightly easier to install restricted codecs, etc. But Windows-like?
Surely you're joking.

Linux components are constantly being improved, the kernel has major
releases every few months and bug fix releases every few weeks. Gnome and
KDE have major releases twice a year and bug fixes between those. This is
true for everything in Linux. So one of the major differentiators between
distros is where do they drive the stake in the ground with respect to
all of these components. Redhat has distros at both ends of the spectrum.
Their bread and butter product, RHEL uses very old versions of everything
while everything in Fedora is still warm from the oven. As a result RHEL
is very stable but it's missing all of the latest features. Fedora has
everything you want but at the expense of reliability. Ubuntu runs a
little behind Fedora so it has most of the latest features but it's also
a little more stable.

Another differentiator is the available themes. Gnome and KDE are
customizable so the distros build themes which alter the looks of Gnome
and KDE. These are purely cosmetic, the underlying functionality is the
same and you can easily change the theme yourself. However the default
theme is what you'll see on a fresh install so it's your first impression
of the distro. In my opinion Ubuntu's turd brown theme is hideous and
Fedora's is very pleasant. However beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

A major differentiator is the package manager which is how Linux distros
install and update software. There are two major systems, Redhat Package
Manager (RPM) and Debian's (DEB). Fedora uses RPM and Ubuntu uses DEB.
Ubuntu's handling of packages is significantly better than Fedora's. I'm
not sure how much of this is due to the underlying technology and how
much is due to the diligence of the repository maintainers. Updates on
Ubuntu just work, in Fedora it's hit or miss. Every few weeks there will
be an update on Fedora that doesn't work because of dependency problem.
Experienced users can get around this by uninstalling and reinstalling
the offending packages but it's a pain. My suspicion is that Fedora's
maintainers are cavalier about adding untested packages to the
repository. I've never seen a problem with CentOS (which is the free
version of RHEL) which is why I think the problem is due to people rather
than to the RPM system. Never the less I can't imagine a better way to
turn someone off to Linux then to have an update break his system, that's
why I'm recommending Ubuntu to new user rather than Fedora even though I
personally like Fedora a whole lot better than Ubuntu.

Another way that distros are different is the GUI configuration tools. I
like Fedoras better than Ubuntu's. However the tool that I mostly use is
webmin, http://www.webmin.com. Webmin is a browser based configuration
tool. It's light years ahead of anything that the distros provide and
best of all it works on almost every Linux and Unix distro so you can use
the same tool even if you switch distros or if you are running different
distros on different machines. Also because it's browser based you can
admin your machines from any system on your network.
.

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