From Ubuntu to Fedora, we land in a strange land (good, bad and ugly)

Recently, I began to notice how difficult it is to develop a desktop environment that you yourself do not use. And, since most of my work now relates to GNOME (and KDE), I realized that I would have to use the new GNOME 3. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 11.04 does not work very well with GNOME 3, in my opinion.

I am a very impatient developer: I really do not like to compile and deal with packages for a long time. When I used the virtual machine, I had to seriously mess with Mutter , so I decided to switch to Fedora. This allowed me to take a fresh look, as I have been using Ubuntu for a long time.

I did not turn my back on Ubuntu. I'm still developing some cool stuff for Natty (you can find them in our ppa), for exampleZeitgeist Privacy Manager using a virtual machine with Ubuntu.

Let's not forget that Zeitgeist was developed using Ubuntu, its community, and that without Ubuntu support it would be more difficult for the project to prove itself fully. We are still using Launchpad and are not going to move. And out of the top 10 Zeitgeist developers, only three (including me at the moment) do not use Ubuntu.

And yet ...

I installed Fedora 15 in place of Ubuntu, which I have been using for six and a half years.

As many of you have probably heard, I am also going to collaborate with Collabora. I work a lot on Zeitgeist, in particular on the main parts of the project, as well as preparing Zeitgeist for GNOME, KDE, and Unity.

Working on GNOME Shell and projects like Totem, Banshee, Rhythmbox, and gedit that need to be integrated with Zeitgeist require me to use GNOME 3 because of Gtk-3. But unfortunately, the current GNOME 3 from PPA does not allow it to be used with Unity. If you want to use them side by side, you will have to wait 11.10.

Still, what is it like to upgrade to Fedora?

Benefits of Fedora

GNOME 3

If you need the latest GNOME right out of the box, then Fedora is the best choice. Without connecting repositories. I do not compare GNOME 3 and Unity. I like both environments, but still my GNOME with Elementary did everything I needed and could give odds to anything. Except for some interesting things available in pure GNOME 3.

Everything works out of the box

Bluetooth, microphone, camera. As in Ubuntu, all the hardware worked immediately after installation.

Lots of wiki and howto

Although they are good enough, you will not find such great sites like OMG! Ubuntu !, dedicated to Fedora. I think this is the thing that naturally comes up when non-geeks like the distribution. Most Linux users who are not geeks and who are not forced to use Linux at work use Ubuntu because they need something simple and at the same time unusual.

RPM Fusion

RPM Fusion provides software that Fedora or Red Hat does not want to ship. The software is available as precompiled RPMs for all current versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. You can use Fusion RPM repositories using tools such as yum and PackageKit. They have almost everything that is in the large Ubuntu repositories.

Work directly with upstream

From a developer's point of view, you will have to work directly with the GNOME upstream. Only two things bother me here: bugzilla and Git. Although Git is very cool, learning how to work with it is quite difficult, and I have to constantly ask for help from more experienced users.

Fedora Disadvantages

No Application Centers and apt

I can not get rid of Yum, which is seriously behind its competitors. I think this is what I don't like about Fedora the most. Instead of the Application Center, you have to use PackageKit, which can not be compared with it.

Complex upstream development environment

Developing upstream can be terrible hemorrhoids. There is no centralized development platform like Launchpad that leaves the combination of Git + Wiki + Bugzilla far behind.

Unable to properly install Flash and proprietary codecs

First you need to manually add RPM Fusion repositories. This is how it was with me: I open the MP3 file with Totem, which says that there are no necessary codecs. When I click Find Codecs, nothing is found. I had to add RPM Fusion turnips and install codecs manually. It is unlikely that any ordinary housewife will get to this.

In this aspect, Ubutnu is much easier to set up. Totem notices that there are no codecs, asks whether to install, and - voila. (The average user is NOT interested in the proprietary codecs). The user will not throw out his MP3 collection due to missing codecs.

There is nothing like PPA

PPAs make it quite easy to get the latest versions of your favorite programs, leaving the main components of the OS stable. I know Fedora has Koji, but PPA remains simpler and more convenient to use.

Conclusion

I urge those who have cojones to try something new and install Fedora 15. Although it differs from Ubuntu, it is for the better.

By user

Fedora is the next great distro after Ubuntu. If not for the absence of the Ubuntu community, the Application Center, and not the annoying Yum, she would have been the killer of Ubuntu. Although Fedora has a community, it is not as large as Ubuntu.

With Fedora you will get GNOME 3. No more GNOME 2. You will have to get used to GNOME 3, but after 2-3 days you won’t want to go back to the second version. Fedora is a stable distribution. For all the time of its use there was not a single drop or any other problems. Googling a little and asking users, I installed everything that I needed.

From the developer

There is a lack of the Ubuntu community and an environment such as Launchpad, more welcoming to new developers. In this case, you will not have problems finding any library or package in Fedora repositories. A big plus is that all your patches are sent directly to the user. However, (maybe this has something to do with politics) so far I'm not going to participate in the development of Fedora. At the moment, I only know that I will use Fedora 15 in the near future .

PS: I know that openSuSE also uses GNOME 3, but at the time when I was going to change the system, openSuSE did not support GNOME 3 out of the box.