Posted on Monday 16th of July 2007 at 09:02 in Linux

It can't be easy being Fedora, overshadowed by Ubuntu

It can't be easy being Fedora; the once cream of the crop release being entirely overshadowed by the young upstart that is Ubuntu. Times have changed and things have been increasingly hard for Fedora - forever slipping in the Distrowatch popularity chart.

For the past 12 months Fedora is ranked 4th, for 2006 it was ranked 3rd, for 2005 it was 4th, for 2004 it was 2nd - whereas Ubuntu has been top for quite some time.

Just look at the Google trends results for this time
It makes for grim viewing comparatively:

fedora graph

You can clearly see Fedora as king through 2004 until Ubuntu (the plucky chap in red) started his rise to fame. Towards Q1 of 2005 Ubuntu surpassed Fedora as the most searched Linux distro and it's stayed there.

But Fedora is awesome, right?
I don't have *that* informed a decision on Fedora right now; I have Fedora Core 7 waiting for me at home for whenever I have a free few days to toy with it but I'm told that Fedora is an amazing distro. Powerful, stable and reliable. In my place of work both the previous Technical Manager and the current one claim Fedora is the best release they've tried.

Ubuntu is suffering Googleitus
As with all things that spiral into popularity they experience a strong 'push back' from many users who are jaded by it's newfound popularity. Linux can be as much about the image as it is the freedom; if it becomes popular it stops becoming cool and I think Ubuntu is starting to feel the backlash of the long-standing community.

Although the backlash from the community is certainly less than the new-user adoption.

I don't *really* like Ubuntu
It just doesn't sit well with me for some reason. It's genius and I love the way they've made complicated things really rather obvious but I just can't sit comfortably with Gnome and Kubuntu isn't really the KDE equivalent. This means that I'm still on the quest for a distro to champion. I've always been a big fan of PCLinuxOS so when that reaches full release I'm hoping I'll have something to shout about.

There's so much happening in the Linux world right now, it just sometimes looks like Fedora is being left behind, but stay tuned because I'll be giving FC7 a good old review in the coming week and we'll see just how much life this old dog has.

Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?

Add Your Comments

Comments

Showing most recent 20 of 23 comments [View all comments]

Hi, I’m from Ecuador, well I had tried too much dist, I began using red hat many years ago, but I think that in enterprise edition is power-full for servers, later I tried with mandriva in my desktop, well it takes a lot of memory, processor and I hate it, later I tried with ubuntu, well it is good for beginner’s, because it is not to stable but it looks nice ;) jaja well now I have installed centos 5 in the server of the company where I work but I don’t know i dislike it too much when I need performance it comports like a dump... well I installed fedora core 9 in my desktop pc and it is great for me now it is stable, have a great performance and the installation is too easy to do for beginners and if you want to have more control well just do it jaja! but linux is linux so you just need to know what is your necessity and take the correct choice.

by Fernando on Thursday 17th of July 2008 at 08:26

I definetively bet for Debian, I ’m actually using the Elive Distro (Enlightenment Desktop based in Debian), and i love it. Debian is stable, eficient and very customizable. I used other distros like Suse, Redhat, Fedora, Ubunt, Mandrake, and definetively Debian is the best for me.

Ubuntu is a very good choice for newbies, in fact i recommend that for them, but Ubuntu lack in eficience and stabiltiy, it sin is the same that i hate in distros like Mandrake(when it named so) an Redhat it consumed a lot of resources.

by Ed on Sunday 22nd of July 2007 at 11:33

I think the great thing about Linux is that there is this choice - you can choose the one that fits your needs.

For me that happens to be Fedora but if that doesn’t happen to be the right one for you, there’s plenty of others. That’s a beauty of a free operating system like Linux.

by am2605 on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 16:06

I have Ubuntu Fiesty on my laptop and Fedora 7 on my desktop.

Both distros are getting pretty good at recognizing hardware.

For me Fedora is great in many regards: flexibility, stability, performance, near-cutting edge packages. BUT it’s a giant pain to make a usable multimedia-friendly desktop with.

Ubuntu lacks the updated packages, but inherits Debian’s stability and easy upgrade path. Automatix2 is really what makes Ubuntu so good... it’s just so easy to setup a desktop with.

If Fedora had an Automatix project, it would get a lot closer to Ubuntu on the desktop.. maybe surpass it.

by josh on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 09:13

I’ve been a user of Fedora Core 5 and CentOS (free RHEL) 4.4 & 5 for a while now.

Fedora required way too much coercing to do basic tasks and installations. Seemed very incomplete. One little kernel update and my machine was hosed. Didn’t have "fake" raid support anymore.

CentOS was great, ran it for a long time. But I started having a few stability problems with version 5 so I decided to give Kubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty) a try.

Wow, what a difference. Installation was a breeze. All of my hardware was detected without a hitch. Adding software is simple and fast. Setting Samba up was a little challenging without the authconfig app that I got used to in RH/Fedora distros, but it works now and flawlessly. KDE seems much more stable in Kubuntu than it ever did in the Redhat-based distros.

For me it’s (K)Ubuntu all the way....for now. :)

by jmiller1978 on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 06:47

I’ve just Redhat 4 last but didn’t like it then and have been using FreeBSD mostly since, and now PC-BSD (www.pcbsd.org), a desktop friendly version of FreeBSD

by PC-BSD on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 04:05

I used Red Hat 8 and 9 a few years ago when there was still some quality left in it. After that came Fedora Core 1 and I thought it would continue where Red Hat left. As I soon fount out this turned out not to be true and I abandoned ship.

I have a feeling that Fedora lies somewhere between the distributions for novices such as OpenSUSE, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, PCLinuxOS and Mepis and the high-quality technical distributions such as Slackware, Debian and Gentoo and such is interesting to neither audience.

Fedora is nowadays nothing more than a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, i.e. relatively untested, slow, incomplete for normal desktop users except for some developers and those that want to live on the bleeding edge without worrying about nuking their system.

Sometimes I download newer Fedora releases but I only install these in virtual machines as a showcase of what the current development state is. For all my and others’ production machines I run Slackware for all workloads and for novices I install OpenSUSE or Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

by psychicist on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 01:24

I guess Ubuntu kicks the shit out of Fedora like Debian always kicked the shit out of Red Hat. Ubuntu clearly has the better foundation to build on (Debian). Feisty isn’t perfect, but it’s very easy to tweak if necesary. I really don’t understand Zaine’s point. In what way does Ubuntu dictate too much? It gives you a nice default desktop/server, after which you can tweak the sh*t out of it (like most other distro’s anyway) if you want/need to and know how to do it. Mint looks okay though i’am not sure what it offers me over Ubuntu. It looks to me like 98.5% ubuntu with some sweet icing over it. It looks good too. I’ll probally give it a try soon.

by Dennis on Wednesday 18th of July 2007 at 00:38

Do we really need articles like this? I have used Redhat and Fedora but now I’m using Ubuntu. There all great distros and there all a little different, which is great as it gives people choice. This something you do not get with Microsoft, I also don’t care what distro people use as long as they�re not using Microsoft.

by Gavin Peters on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 23:55

Excellent article.
I love Ubuntu but not Feisty. It does NOT start my scanner (neither does Fed 7
nor PCLinuxOS nor Linux Mint nor... one of the latest kernels).
On the other hand I adore the latest DreamLinux; except for my strange WIFI
everything works out of the box (no Dutch to my regret)
Give it a try, you’ll love it.

by dompie on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 23:05

I personally started using Red Hat in college at the labs. I really didn’t start using Linux at home until win2000 craped on me for the last time. My friend had a Breezy Badger CD and yep, it just worked. Since then I’ve moved onto Debian and I really think that there is not that much reason to be using Ubuntu any more, not even for laptops. Right now I’m typing this from an IBM Thinkpad on wifi. Infact after startup the only thing I had to instal my self was the ipw driver from the non-free repository.

Ubuntu is definatly slick though. But here is my break down:

Ubuntu is to Debian as Fedora is to Red Hat as openSuse is to SLED.
Are we seeing a trend yet with the major distributions? I’m not saying
it’s a bad trend just noticeable. ..... and that’s my 2 cents.

by Jesse W on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 22:13

I’m utilizing FC6.1 as a httpd-SMB-Squid-server at my office. I’m using F7 at home. I’m totally biased when it comes to Ubuntu, or specifically, Debian-based distros. Mainly because I use RH since 7-9, and then after RH9, I jump to FC6. RPM has always been my friend, and Yum makes life easier than it ever before (assuming that you have an Internet connection, if not, that’s dependency hell for you).

Ubuntu is nice, really user-friendly, and all, but it just doesn’t have the maturity, stability, and security of senior distros such as RH-Fedora. I love Fedora’s SELinux solution, which I intentionally turn off at home, but turn on all enforcing at the office... And I love all the server modules that are included in the distribution. PHP, SQL, KrbAuth, httpd, and the extra (plus powerful) NTFS-3g, the big thing in going around with a NT environment.

All in all, yes, Fedora isn’t for the casual, usual, and less-technical Linux users, it’s a powerful OS that is used on professional platforms. Ubuntu is nice, but I surely don’t recommend it to be used in everyday server routines. And maybe this is the reason why Fedora is losing the edge on web-rankings, because many of Linux users are actually non-technical. They want a Tux distro that ’just works’. Either way, it’s a good call, .. it’s a sign that Linux OSes are more assimilated to the global computing market, and ... hopefully, leaving M$ alone biting the dust.

Just my 2 cents.

by KorganoS on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 21:52

As a long time linux user since the old SLS and early slack days, and subsequently redhat 3.0-4.0 etc, I’ve seen them come a long way since then. With development came bloat and slowness. The old redhat distros were lean and mean. Today most distros are fat bloated garbage infested slugs. When free redhat became fedora I started seeing frequent problems, dependency failures, build failures etc and gave up on redhat/fedora.

FC7 is nice, but it’s still bloated and sluggish, in fact far more sluggish than XP on the same machine. I tried it but dumped it.

Debian is my distro of choice, it can be as sleek and small as 180megs or you can bloat it up with GNOME (Yucks) or KDE and push it past the 1gb mark. Still, debian or ubuntu with a light window manager like XFCE or ICEWM really kickass.

by Zigler on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 21:45

An interesting article. While there is no doubt Ubuntu has come a long way, I question your use of Google trends as a "ranking" metric. I just re-ran ubuntu vs fedora on Google trends and found that all those peaks in the graph are either

"Ubuntu Security Notice" or
"Linux distros Ubuntu, Trustix, and Suse accused of email spam"

I long term trend is evident but the graph’s do not necessarily depict ranking.

At least one factor that I feel is a big contributor to Ubuntu’s success is the ease of adding non-free drivers and codecs.

by linuxamp on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 21:32

Honestly, you see one Gnome or KDE desktop, youve seen then all.

Ive gotten some friends to DL different LIVE cd’s to see all the choices and the first thing they say is ’its more or less looks all the same’.

by Terry Lechecul on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 20:57

Interesting, I think the PCLOS stats show that the distrowatch is by far a very unreliable source for popularity. Google searches IMO are a better indicator, better yet is amount of Downloads which Fedora / Red Hat openly publishes. Funny how other distros do not do the same.

Fedora I am a fan boy of so not fair for me to comment about the distro itself as you know what I will say. I have been a huge RH fan since the start and its one of the only distros that works for me everytime. Obviously I am more familiar with it so that may also be part of the reason for.

Fedora is not for newbies, PCLOS / MEPIS are perfect distros for that. I use PCLOS on the kids PC and I actually like that distro alot. Just to explain my comments above..

by Bryan on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 20:47

I’m using Fedora right now and am loving it. Fonts are beautiful, the system is fast (3D included), and so far everything works as I’d expect it to. Including SELinux by default is a big reason that I’ve chosen Fedora right now: I’m no sysadmin, and I couldn’t set this up on my own.

As for some complaints above:
* MP3 playback is fine for me. I installed gstreamer-bad, ugly, and ffmpeg and it worked throughout my system. In Ubuntu, I found that even installing all of these codecs wasn’t always reliably configured throughout my audio apps, sending me to Automatix or EasyUbuntu.
* This is the ONLY distro I’ve been able to get my thumbdrive to work on, or more accurately, I fixed it in Fedora. Others just spat back error messages, or displayed a Lock icon in GParted, but Fedora actually successfully repartitioned the 2GB as a FAT16, and now I can use it! This is a big deal for me, because I could only use it in Mac and Windows before.
* I installed over 30 apps and various oddball packages (zsh, madwifi, etc.) through the package manager frontend and it worked perfectly. A full system upgrade worked perfectly, although it was a little slower than Synaptic for this purpose. Certainly faster than YaST, however.

In short, I’m really enjoying using Fedora! SELinux is one of those features that might keep me with Fedora for a long time, as long as I don’t run into any major obstacles.

by ThinkBuntu on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 09:48

John > PCLinuxOS doesn’t even measure on that chart I’m afraid... Good distro as it is, staggaring popularity it does not have. Yet.

by Harpo on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 08:28

Wow, Where is PClinuxOS on that chart!? I think that has to be the best distro going so far!

by John on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 08:01

FC 2was my first Linux distro. It was difficult to configure, but I stayed with Fedora till FC3. Things didn’t change, so I moved to Ubuntu 4.10. Last month I instaled FC7 to see what has changed. The looks are beautiful, the installation is easy and so on. But the drawbacks are the same:
1 - FC7 refused to recognize my pendrive
2 - It didn’t mount my other Linux partitions (sidux and LinuxMint))
3 - It refused to give me MP3 playback, even with a ton of codecs installed from various sources/threads/howtos/tutorials
4 - It refused to install nVidia driver
5 - Updates took a LOOOOOONG time to succeed
6 - When I tried to install some ordinary software, I fell in the dreary Dependency Hell

So, I did it my final goodbye.

by ceti on Monday 16th of July 2007 at 16:20