Coffee Dharma

The Ubuntu Move

Posted on 12. Nov, 2007 by Rob in All, Musings, Older, Review

After writing my last entry I have made some changes in my new Linux experience. Fedora 8 was a great experience but was a little too buggy for my lack of Linux knowledge. I reverted back to Fedora 7 for a day until I was asked to give Ubuntu another try and do a review. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and took the time to work through my graphic driver issues. I still wish Ubuntu had better NVIDIA support but after some support forum reading and getting to know my terminal I had the problem resolved and Compiz was chugging away. I have to say that after my initial issues with drivers, Ubuntu is far more stable than either Fedora distro. As I stated before, Fedora is an experimental distro and may or may not work well on your computer. Ubuntu is designed to be a more stable desktop environment for the masses so you may have better luck.

I wanted to take some time comparing a few differences between Fedora and Ubuntu (in my experience). I am new to this so there will likely be some mistakes in these comparisons but I will keep it simple.

The biggest difference for me was the RPM (Fedora) versus Apt-get (Ubuntu) when retrieving applications and installs. While there are a lot of great RPMs out there for Fedora I found the apt-get experience faster and easier to work with. The Synaptic Package Manager is a breeze to use and I found that 99% of what I needed was quickly found using it. Many tutorials on the web reference apt-get when giving instructions so it was much easier to find quick forum tutorials when dealing with Ubuntu. You may or may not find this to be the case for you. Neither method was superior in my experience, just a personal preference.

The look of Ubuntu and Fedora is an often discussed difference in forums and comments. I personally didn’t see much of a difference besides the obvious theme differences. I was able to easily add the new Nodoku theme and engine to Ubuntu so this seems like a nonplus issue for me.

I did have some issues in Fedora 8 running some of my favorites like the AWN dock (an OS X style dock for Linux) but it ran well in both Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 7.10

I think your choice between these two distros (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10) is going to come down to preference. If your looking for a bleeding-edge experimental distro then I recommend giving Fedora a try. The documentation and support forum make it a great experience and one that will show you what is next in the Linux world. If you are looking for a more stable and standard desktop environment (I only noticed a few things missing in Gutsy) then Ubuntu is the way to go. I love customization and an easy working environment so Ubuntu fit the bill for me. Again I’ll say though that Linux is all about choice so you should feel free to give a few distros a try (or all of them if you have the time and patience) and see which one works best on your computer and gives you the highest level of productivity.

Tags: Linux, Musings, News, Review, Software, Tech, Ubuntu