I Switched (Back) Over To Fedora As My Main OS & It's Going Great!

[phoronix]

Phoronix: I Switched (Back) Over To Fedora As My Main OS & It's Going Great!

After having used Ubuntu Linux on my main production system for about the past six years or so, I'm back to using Fedora as my main OS. So far the Fedora 21 experience has been going excellent...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-21-My-Main-Linux-OS

[gens]

if history repeats itself, with rhel7 out you can expect less stability with future fedoras
may not be so
either way, hf

[Dukenukemx]

I may have to look into Fedora in the future. Last time I sued it there wasn't any convenient software center like Ubuntu. Plus I like how I'm able to stick Ubuntu into machines old as time. Though I try to use Mint when I can but Mint doesn't like old Athlon Xp machines. Has no problem in Pentium 4's though.

[samdraz]

Nice to know fedora is getting better attention for end users, have been using both debian and fedora long time.

[Morpheus]

How can you be sure Ubuntu is still the most used Linux distro out ? Even on distrowatch, it shows Mint on top, but I'm not sure if it can be considered as absolute barometer...

[Tuxee]

How can you be sure Ubuntu is still the most used Linux distro out ? Even on distrowatch, it shows Mint on top, but I'm not sure if it can be considered as absolute barometer...

Sigh.

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

See http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

One could check out

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

or

https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm

According to these stats Ubuntu is still by far the most popular explicitly named distribution.

[GraysonPeddie]

Yeah, Ubuntu appears to be very stale with no improvements to the look and feel of Unity desktop. At least with 15.04 I could enable the ability to always show global menu, which is very nice and makes it look more Mac-like. As for Unity supporting GTK 3.14, at least I could replace Ubuntu's Nautilus file manager with GNOME's version. And one last thing, I'd hope the Ambiance GTK3 3.14 theme would support header bars like in GNOME 3 and elementary OS. It's nice and I like getting the best of both worlds from GNOME and Unity. I've been doing desktop environment hopping for the last few months.

elementary OS is not perfect since I'd like to have it in Ubuntu 14.10+ and not be stuck in LTS, Deepin Linux is not perfect since I tried to change the wallpaper using Nautilus 3.14 but do love the launcher and control center, and Unity is not perfect since I tried making use of GNOME applications with header bar and it lacked shadows due to a missing title bar. (You will need to be a member of LinuxMusicians before you can see images.) Plus, not shown in screenshots, if I tried using a GTK 3.14 theme such as Adwaita, elementary OS theme, or Ambiance or Radiance theme for GNOME 3.14, the menus in the global menu bar will appear to have up/down arrows for scrolling through menus (File, Edit, View, ...) and it's incompatible with Unity. Methinks it appears Unity is a fork of GNOME Shell 3.8 or earlier and does not take advantage of what GNOME 3.10 and later has to offer.

You know what? I love the HUD and a Mac-like interface of Unity with global menu bar, but no more boutique desktop environments that only work well with their specific Linux distributions. Unity works well with Ubuntu, pantheon works well with elementary OS, and Deepin Desktop Environment only works well with Linux Deepin 2014. So the only desktop environment that I like so far is GNOME Shell and it works very well with many Linux distributions, provided that Linux distributions are kept up to date with GNOME 3.14. And yes, GNOME 3 is a very controversial desktop environment, but it just keeps getting better and better. And if I could have all that HUD functionality and Mac-like global menu that's available in Unity, but in GNOME Shell, I don't need to be hopping between desktop environments. And so is Unity, a very controversial desktop environment, but even though it's gotten better over the years, GNOME 3 is still leaps and bounds better than Unity when it comes to extensions.

And that leads me to ending distro hopping. For that, I'm very happy with Arch and GNOME 3. However, I might have a look at what Unity 8 and Mir has to offer, even though it's at an early stage of development right now even though Canonical is very slow about making changes and they are so heavily focused in mobile right now. I would love to see some innovations made for the Linux desktop world.

Whew... What a lot of writing... :/

[duby229]

Well, that's good. Personally I think Canonical should be totally boycotted. Anybody not blinded can see them for what they are. It's good to see you using a distribution where they actually contribute back to upstream projects. (upstream projects that they didn't create) (Ubuntu only reliably contributes to projects they maintain, and that's bad for everyone, including themselves.)

[TumultuousUnicorn]

I have used Ubuntu until 2010. Since Canonical has decided to play alone in Free Software world (Unity, Mir and co), I think Ubuntu is like a sect, I consided this distro dead.

Fedora is great.

[GreatEmerald]

Methinks it appears Unity is a fork of GNOME Shell 3.8 or earlier and does not take advantage of what GNOME 3.10 and later has to offer.

Unity is not a fork of anything as far as I know. It seems more likely to me that Canonical implemented some standards used in GNOME up to the 3.8 times and just haven't been keeping up to date since.