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Positive Initial Impression of Fedora



I've used off and on Ubuntu for about 7 years now. And I've been generally happy. However, recently I've found the behavior of Canonical and, more importantly, the lethargic pace of package updates to be off putting.

Really the behavior of Canonical is something I can live with, but it does give me reason to check out other distros. The slow pace of package updates is an actual problem. Yes I do want the newest stable release of Go and Eclipse. And yeah I do want to use the package manager with little or no configuration. Finally, don't like Unity. Didn't want to say it for a while, but yeah, the side bar is annoying, I don't like uninstalling Amazon, and the scopes don't work smoothly enough for me not to just search Wikipedia in chrome.

Consequently in the last year I've tried Arch, Suse, Mint, and finally Fedora.

Arch was high maintenance. It was satisfying setting up my system from such a low level. But, it was not fun debugging my setup every time I needed to install a new library. I experiment with coding, not with my system.I need my OS stable.

Mint is alright. But I've using a Debian based distro for a while wanted to try something different.

Suse was frustrating.

Fedora is pretty good

I installed on my laptop and everything worked right away. This seems to be common for modern linux distros (except arch), but I figure its worth mentioning that I didn't have to spend an hour installing crap after install like I did in 2007.

Fonts look ok. Not quit as sharp as Ubuntu, but definitely way better than Suse after install. Seriously that was basically unreadable.

After installing oh my zsh! installing packages with yum is just as easy as with apt-get. This is another place where Suse didn't cut it. I end up installing a lot libraries that I might not know the name of before hand and this is a big deal, saves me a half a minute here and there.

Package availability is also gigantic. Most projects that offer linux binaries offer Debian and RPM. Other distros (Suse) use .rpm, but I think most developers have Fedora/RedHat in mind when they

Conclusion

Between font readability, the ease of installing (and availability) the packages, and a jingoistic desire to use 'Merican software, Fedora is a winner. I think I'm going to stick with that for a while. At least until SteamOS hits it's stride.

Update

Yum and service don't seem to be tab completing. Annoying. Will have have to see if I can't figure that out.
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