Bonum Certa Men Certa

Red Hat's Desktop Efforts (e.g. Fedora) Lag Behind the Debian Camp

Fedora



Summary: Fedora, despite leading in much of the technical side, fails to catch up with the reliability of Debian-derived desktop distributions

Fedora is Red Hat's breeding ground for innovation in GNU/Linux, especially when it comes to the desktop side. Yum is being phased out and Fedora repositories (with binary packages [1]) leave room for desire [2]. I used Fedora with KDE numerous times before, from version 1 (Fedora Core) through to 14, which I used only for a few months. Fedora 11 is the one that I used the most with KDE and it was never as satisfactory as Kubuntu, especially because packages were not as simple to install (I have 3 Kubuntu installations at the moment, one Debian). My experiences with KDE in Fedora are not unique [3] and staff inside Fedora calls for testing of Fedora 20 [4], hoping this would help identify bugs. Based on the quality of previous releases, it's hard to believe this one would offer a high level of polish.



Fedora does not have many derivatives. There are some like Hanthana [5] and Korora [6], which are now derived from the latest stable Fedora, but neither one is exceptionally popular (or at least not ubiquitous). In my view, and based on my many experiences with Fedora since the project was born, desktops that are derived from Debian are generally more reliable and easier to maintain. At work, Debian is our standard system to use. Red Hat needs to recognise this and put more effort into the desktop side. Phoronix has some new benchmarks [7,8] and Tecmint has a comparison from an administrative point of view [9].

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. Conky Manager Fedora Packages


  2. Handbrake for Fedora, it’s a thing
    I was reading today about how the Korora spin on Fedora includes Handbrake, the popular cross-platform video transcoding/DVD-ripping utility.

    But I am running regular Fedora 19, albeit with proprietary-package assistance from RPM Fusion and a few other repositories.

    Still, Handbrake isn’t in any of those repos.


  3. I tried Fedora 19 KDE one more time
    My first attempt to use Fedora 19 KDE was not very successful. I was not able to even login into the system, spinning on the login screen endlessly. So much for that. In the beta phase before that, I discovered a whole bunch of bugs, including a severe kernel panic that would kick in on the graphical stack approx. five minutes into the session. All in all, it was a blunder.


  4. Upcoming Test Days, and Fedora 20 status
    If anyone’s noticed I haven’t been around as much lately – I’m in Europe visiting family and friends (and, later this week, the Brno office!) If anything I’m busier than usual, but there’s a lot of dealing with personal administrivia and seeing people, so I’m not getting as much work done as usual. (Plus my internet connections here are much slower and I’m on my laptop instead of my usual mission control, which makes me a lot less efficient). Normal service should be resumed around Oct 19th, please do not adjust your sets!


  5. Hanthana 19.0 Review: Sri Lankan spiced up Fedora, has some bugs but quite good in overall
  6. Korora 19.1 released
    Today we have released Korora 19.1 which is a 3 month update to the original 19 release. Anyone already running Korora doesn’t need this, however if you are planning do any more installs we highly recommend downloading this new release as it includes all updates, a few tweaks and fixes a number of bugs. This release also includes versions of the MATE and Cinnamon desktops which we’ve created to gauge community interest.


  7. Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora Linux CPU Benchmarks
    A few days back I shared OpenGL benchmarks of Fedora 19, Fedora 20, Ubuntu 13.04, and Ubuntu 13.10. For those not interested in the CPU performance of these four Linux distributions, those results are now available.


  8. The First Wayland Benchmarks From Fedora 20 Show Great Promise
    Since last week it's been possible to run the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Fedora 20. The user-experience isn't yet refined and easy, but Linux enthusiasts can easily get a GNOME 3.10 session running on Wayland for testing purposes using F20 packages. In this article are the first graphics benchmarks from Fedora 20 when running GNOME 3.10 on Wayland with XWayland support and then from running a clean X.Org Server.


  9. RedHat vs Debian : Administrative Point of View




Recent Techrights' Posts

Linux Foundation Has Found a New Business: Pyramid Schemes
Linus Torvalds should have known better
IBM's Total Debt is About to Hit Almost 80 Billion Dollars, the Company Can Only Raise $14.8 Billion Within 3 Months
Route towards insolvency, not just irrelevancy
IBMers Impacted by the Mass Layoffs (Which IBM Tries Not to Talk About) Are Livid as the CEO "Spends 11 Billion He Doesn’t Have"
IBM dooms both its brand and its future
Consumerism and Christmas
Many of us yearn for prior decades when December was about family, not shopping
OpenAI Traffic Collapsing (for 3 Months in a Row About 20% Down Per Month), Bankruptcy Likely Soon
How much time has OpenAI got before its massive debt is too much for anyone to shoulder or bear?
IBM + NDA = Laid Off Workers Saying "Thank You" for the Layoffs
The important thing is, for now, more people become aware of it
 
Links 09/12/2025: "After the Bubble" (of Slop), "The Internet Forgets"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/12/2025: Lunar Observations and Programming
Links for the day
They Won't Tell You This ("Revolution Won't Be Televised"), But the Slop Bubble Already Burst
We already wrote about it twice this morning
UbuntuPIT Started Experimenting With LLM Slop and a Month Ago It 'Died'
This is the typical trajectory of slopfarms
LibreWolf Will Turn Six in March, It Already (Probably) Has Millions of Users
It's not possible to know the number of users LibreWolf has
The Year of the New Dark Age
Something isn't right
Slopwatch May be Doomed
Slop isn't changing the world, certainly not in a good way anyway
BetaNews Still a Dodgy Site, It Seems to be Partly Run by Chatbots
The company that took over apparently tries to "monetise" the domain with slop
Tomorrow the EPO Administrative Council is Meeting to Discuss the EPO, Contact Your National Representative Today
Final versions of the EPO Administrative Council photo gallery
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 08, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, December 08, 2025
'Linux' Foundation 'Research' (Marketing) Has New Report About "Open Source" and It Was Made Using Proprietary Software and Not Linux
what 'Linux' Foundation 'Research' is
Links 08/12/2025: Cambodia-Thailand Air Raids, Japan/China Military Incident
Links for the day
The "Cut 10,000 Jobs" Clickbait and Microsoft Sites Now Speculating That Microsoft CEO Has Just Signalled More Mass Layoffs
by our tally, Microsoft had more than 30,000 layoffs this year, not 15,000
Canonical Outsourcing Ubuntu to Microsoft Results in Broken Ubuntu, Just as One Can Expect
State actors and Microsoft prefer it that way
Mocking a Software Developer for Using the Terminal or Programs Like Emacs
A decade ago someone asked RMS (Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement) to send a screenshot
Monsieur Claude Sahl, Part of the Administrative Council of the EPO (Which Fails to Administer the EPO), Has Been There For Over 30 Years
They have basically built themselves a very expensive palace in Bavaria (Germany), in which to grant European monopolies to billionaires and companies that aren't even European
Open Letter to the Administrative Council of the EPO Calls For Action as Salaries Decrease (Just Like Patent Validity)
Based on what I heard and spoke about with journalists, they accept there is a substance abuse problem at the EPO's management
Links 08/12/2025: "Leaving Intel" (Exodus Continues) and Ways "to Civilize Digital Life"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/12/2025: Earbuds and Offline 'Smartphones'
Links for the day
Books About Bubbles
calling things "AI" and "AIs" can mislead the reader
Links 08/12/2025: Slop Failing and Windows Users Won't 'Upgrade' Due to Slop
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 07, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, December 07, 2025
IBM's Mass Layoffs Will Continue Until Morale Improves
From recent hours
Links 07/12/2025: Political Catchup, Conflicts, Environmentalism
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/12/2025: "Lazy Saturday" and Kubernetes With FreeBSD
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 06, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, December 06, 2025