[purpled_haze]

I'm curious- what do you think of Fedora? It's in the top 5 distros along with OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint, and yet I hardly ever hear people talk about it.

I had personally given up on Fedora years ago, but recently was told I should give it a second look and I've not had time to try it out.

[DanBC]

Fedora isn't for non technical family members. Here's a bit of mild whinging that's only relevant if you want to give it to non-technical people.

There's a move to give stuff generic names, rather than the obscure names they had in the past. For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. When a non technical person needs to search for hep this new name makes it impossible for them to create a useful search term.

[files foo bar] is going to be different from [nautilus foo bar]. Frustratingly the old name works for searching, but it's not in any titlebars or about boxes or menu items, so the non-technical person has to just know that files is also sometimes called Nautilus.

Fedora 20 has an appstore. This has something like 4 different names - in the menu, in the title bar, in the about box, in the icon.

For what it is (a rapidly released testing distro) it's lovely - nice community (from what I could tell) and lots of activity.

[LeonidasXIV]

> There's a move to give stuff generic names

That's not so much a Fedora thing but a GNOME move, as the RPM containing "Files" is still called Nautilus.

Also, I am a bit surprised since it goes contrary to your argument, because when a user looks for a file explorer he's much more likely to find that looking for "Files" rather than the (rather strange, really) name of "Nautilus".

I would see myself as a technical user and yet I have no idea how the apps on my Android device are called. One is called generically "Gallery" and another one even worse, "E-Mail".

[toyg]

KDE historically worked around this problem by displaying a description as well as the name, e.g. something like "Nautilus - File explorer". It worked great.

Thing is, the move to generic names is basically an ego trip from Linux developers. Consistent products like Windows or OSX, which are monolithic and have bazillion of users with the exact same configuration, can get away with it; but the Linux world is a forest of different apps from random developers, haphazardly packaged by this or that distribution and continuously updated every few months. In this environment, thinking you can just refer to "Ubuntu files" or "Fedora files" is a pipe dream; often the solution to your problems will be on sources that are not specific to the distro you are actually using (see for example the Arch and Gentoo wikis).

[Avshalom]

Who is this user though? Apple has Finder, Microsoft: Explorer, Android/iOS: nothing, and unless they've installed the CLI/minimal edition of a linux distro it has a file manager and they launch it not by selecting the application from a menu but clicking on a folder icon.

Making the name basically irrelevant unless they need to ask a question about it in which case enter googlability.

[y4mi]

They are not exclusive though - there is nothing stopping them from calling it 'Nautilus Files' ^^

[okasaki]

> For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files.

It's a bad trend. It's really frustrating when you're trying to find out what the executable or package name is.

[Brakenshire]

I don't think there's that much wrong with "Gnome Files". That should be enough to search for help, and also gives information about what the program does. Similarly, I would say the names should be "Firefox Browser", "Geary Email" etc (if we're aiming to be user friendly).

[DanBC]

"Gnome Files" should be fine, if people know it's called "Gnome Files", and if people know to use "exact search".

In Fedora 20 the name "Gnome Files" was hard to discover (that may have changed in later Fedoras) and non technical people just don't know how to search.

[downtide]

I like the categorisation aswell as a name (and version).

In your desktop environment, 'Open web browser' (as an action), can be associated with whichever browser you prefer. And perhaps a context menu on that to choose between many.

I prefer something like: Gnome file manager: 'Nautilus', to the browser: 'Web'. How ghastly.

To differentiate between many, like both of Windows' web browsers: Edge and Internet Explorer. You could say Windows web browser Edge. Or Edge; Windows' web browser. Windows itself is a confusing name, but that's another conversation.

[sandGorgon]

so I just moved to Fedora 23 after 10 years on Ubuntu. It was something that I was very hesitant about, but Fedora 23 has totally smashed it out of the park.

I think the usability is miles ahead of Ubuntu atleast - I realize that is a personal opinion, but I love that Fedora is a tightly integrated Gnome (and soon Wayland distro).

[baldfat]

Don't want to be that evangelist guy BUT OpenSUSE really deserves a second looks and it is non-technical family member friendly. They are super stable and provide one-click install off the web like Mint, but it install them as a regular repo which makes updating them a breeze.

On the technical I love OpenSUSE for zypper, build (Any software you need is probably on there and it will even build for other distros), rolling releases in Tumbleweed, and the best KDE default environment for over a decade..

[auxym]

OpenSUSE is great, YAST is the best "control panel" app I've seen in any distro, you can configure antyhing without ever opening a terminal or vim. Zypper has also been more robust for me than apt (I've seen apt-get hell once or twice).

That said, stay away from Tumbleweed (rolling release). In my experience it's been even less stable than Arch or Sid. In the past I've had kernel updates making the machine unbootable, though thankfully the distro does keep all previously installed kernels, easily selectable in GRUB. Just yesterday I banged my head against a year-old bug that pgadmin3 is broken because it hasn't been rebuilt against the distributed version of wx (come on).

[baldfat]

When was the last time you tried Tumbleweed? It has improved a ton and especially with this latest LEAP release.

[zwarag]

Fedora has come a long way from where it came from. It is much better then it used to be and has become really fast, secure, and yes: user-friendly.

I use Fedora @work and Ubuntu @home. The reason I use Ubuntu @home is that my roommates run Ubuntu too and we get all the same Versions on whatever software.

But @work I run Fedora. There aren't any particular reasons except that it just "feels" better to work on that on Ubuntu. I definitely recommend to give it a try.

Using something like Fedy or easyLife makes setting up Fedora fun and fast.

https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy

http://easylifeproject.org/

[moonchrome]

Ubuntu is just too dated for development work IMO - I need to rebuild everything from source or find 3rd party PPA for anything remotely recent - I'm fine with compiling deps for production but for development the distro really shouldn't be getting in my way of trying new stuff out.

That said I've had many performance issues on GNOME - I like the way it looks and the "feel" and I got used to the UI over the last year or more but frankly it's constantly hogging my PC down, both desktop an laptop - when I switched to KDE/plasma 5 I saw my WebGL chrome app go from 40-50 FPS to consistent 60 FPS - both tests done after a clean start and simply starting the app letting it run for a while. The entire system feels more responsive - can't trace the issue but the results are measurable and noticeable

I've had flicker and stability issues with KDE 5 when I last tried it a year ago but now it appears quite stable. My only complaint is that themes/design community are nowhere near to Gnome.

[rincebrain]

LTS or the other versions?

Any distro with a release schedule is going to have caveats about not having prebuilt packages for the latest XYZ. The only things I can think of that might give you a faster update schedule than Ubuntu (in terms of newer versions, not just point releases) would be Fedora, Arch, or Gentoo.

[moonchrome]

Even the standard releases are too stale, in LTS dev tools and compilers are ancient.

I've forgot to mention I've moved to Fedora a year or two back for this reason - got tired of rebuilding/PPA hunting for every part of my OS when I want to use the latest version of tool/lib X.

And once dependencies are too old (very often) prepare to be rebuilding 5+ custom libs and figuring out the differences between debian package/path layout and what the library build uses ... so much wasted time.

[_yy]

It's easily the most secure Linux distro. It has SELinux enabled by default (and it actually works!) and compiles binaries using most of the available hardening features, other than basically any other mainstream distro.

They have an excellent testing/QA process, especially given the speed at which they're developing - this results in a very high quality.

[SFjulie1]

If you call secure an OS which can crash process without giving meaningful errors.

I have lost hours debugging mysterious crashes because of SELinux, and it is really not safe to have components unexpectedly crashing when they are part of your core infra.

Plus I guess that like every security frameworks it runs with priviledge, it has a lot of lines of code, is hard to audit, and thus highers the surface of vulnerability.

Hint: they use for instance strcmp a lot http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24353504/whats-wrong-with...

Their code mixes if(){} with the if() else (without braces)

They are sometimes using enums, sometimes #define sometimes magic values to refer to constant values.

You should really read the source code.

Definitively above the average of C code in the wild, still having well known code smell.

I would like to see if PVS studio could confirm my intuition.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

[reality_czech]

Wow. You literally think selinux is bad because it uses strcmp and enums? Maybe you should read a book about C sometime before you make a fool of yourself on the internets.

[dizzystar]

I use Fedora and I truly do love it. I find it to be far more stable than other distros I've tried, and it really does "just work."

I know I've been suggesting it to people who are considering Linux for the first time, with the caveat of disabling SElinux.

With that said, I'm not sure if it is good for non-technical people or people who aren't interested in learning about it. Getting certain things installed can be a bit of work, as they don't support things like Chrome or even Chromium by default. I also view it from the perspective of not knowing how to use any graphical installers (do they exist?). If I was aware of that stuff, I'd possibly consider it for non-technical users, but as it stands, I don't.

[LeonidasXIV]

> I also view it from the perspective of not knowing how to use any graphical installers (do they exist?)

Yes, it exists and works pretty good when I installed it. Set up encrypted LUKS, EFI just fine and I found it reasonably pleasant to use.

[ferbivore]

I think he meant graphical package managers, not Anaconda.

[INTPenis]

I'm not even sure I would recommend a novice user to disable SElinux because the only times I configure SElinux are when setting up developer specific things.

[rplnt]

There are two huge disadvantages why I wouldn't recommend it to everyone (though I use it myself):

1) strict licensing restrictions - lots of basic functionality/software missing from official repositories; there is rpmfusion of course, but that's not something my mom should know how to install

2) Very short support. You'll be stuck without updates in no time, and upgrading to possibly broken release (that might radically change things) every few months is ridiculous.

So.. if they were to offer LTS version, I'd happily recommend it to everyone. As it is, it's great if you don't mind the caveats mentioned above (especially everything that stems from 2nd point). CentOS is not a viable alternative, as it is "enterprise" OS stuck with archaic software.

[riquito]

> 2) Very short support. You'll be stuck without updates in no time, and upgrading to possibly broken release (that might radically change things) every few months is ridiculous.

New releases are out after around 6 months. If you find release upgrades risky you can always wait a whole year and stay one release behind (any bug would have been ironed out in that time).

I usually don't update in the first couple weeks and I hadn't any problem with a Fedora upgrade in the last two/three years.

[smt88]

Fedora's latest release rocks. Fedora used to have stability issues here or there because it's the cutting-edge version of RHEL, but I think it's unlikely you'd run into those in everyday usage with mainstream hardware. It shouldn't be less stable than Ubuntu.

[na85]

Is the recommended way to switch between major versions of Fedora still to wipe and reinstall?

For a long time back in the early teen releases there were no sane upgrade paths which pushed me to Debian.

[verbatim]

No, there are now fully integrated system update tools that handle this smoothly.

[jnbiche]

I used to use Fedora with KDE 5 or so years ago. I liked it fine. The only think I lacked was the convenience of deb packages since so many projects offer debs, and using alien to install debs with yum was painful (they've changed package managers now, if I'm not mistaken).

Probably, if I move away from the convenience of a Debian derivative these days, it will be to FreeBSD.

[eatonphil]

If you do end up switching to FreeBSD and are looking for some help, feel free to email me! It'll be a bit of the blind leading the blind; I finally got FreeBSD working [wifi, desktop] 6 months ago. But I'd been running Ubuntu for the past 5 years before this so I'm familiar with some of the transition-confusion. I've been using FreeBSD exclusively for work and and servers with the exception of work servers (which are still Ubuntu).

[jsjohnst]

What projects are you looking at that primarily only package a deb? I frequent far flung corners of the web and have never had trouble finding an RPM (have on occasion had trouble finding a deb though)

[lucb1e]

I've had both, depending on what I was looking for at the moment. Server and/or enterprise stuff, perhaps some management system for something, never offered debs. Lots of user software seems to give me debs a lot more often than rpms. It also shifted over time I think, debs being more popular recently and rpms less so.

[INTPenis]

As a sysadmin Fedora is my go to distro. I can't say if regular users could manage but I think they would since it's mostly vanilla Gnome 3.

My reason for choosing Fedora is because of its maturity, major player backing and SElinux implementation.

It works great, I feel like a modern Linux user in Fedora.