CargoBay

So I have been trying to get Ubuntu 9.10 working for more than a month, but it became harder and harder to keep it functional. So as of today, I no longer have any computer installed with Ubuntu they all run Fedora. And to be perfectly honest, I actually trust the work done by both Red Hat for Fedora and Novell for Suse a lot more than the work Canonical has done for Ubuntu.

Why is that you might wonder. Well, to begin with take a look at the structure of the companies. Both Red Hat and Novell has a purely commercial variant of their Linux distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL) and Suse Linux Enterprise(SLES/SLED). Both also have two community driven distribution that they use for "testing" and evaluating software before they incorporate it into their commercial distribution. These are Fedora Linux for Red Hat and OpenSUSE for Novell. Canonical only has the Ubuntu distribution in it's variants and tries to sell support for their distribution, but you don't need it to run their version.

So what more than the the commercial differences is there? Well, as noted in my previous post Fedora is a Tier1 distribution. As it's "owned" by Red Hat it packages, tests, and compiles all the software by them self. Ubuntu is a Tier2 distribution based on the Debian Tier1 project, and thus don't have any control over the packaging system or the patches that first has to be incorporated into the Debian distribution before they become available to the Ubuntu distribution.

A second, more personal, note is that Debian to some extent and Ubuntu for sure doesn't push the boundaries and supplies code, patches, software and innovation to the Linux community as a whole. It's purely focused on getting the parts working together, and not evolving as a distribution. Here both Red Hat and Novell has employees working with the F/OSS community in large to create better and more stable software in new and interesting ways. In essence they are looking forward for stability and the Debian community is looking backwards for the same.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but my preferences is with the ones that gets things done and I trust. And in that regard I trust Red Hat as they have a very good track record and I don't trust Canonical/Debian for the same reason, as their track record is quite tarnished with problems. Do I have to remind you of the Debian OpenSSL fiasko, in where they made all forms of encryption keys vulnerable created by a OS based on Debian.

So for my part. The future on the desktop for me is Fedora and if I need a server then it's FreeBSD. A stable, secure and functional combination in my opinion.