OSNews

Nothing. Taking this "community based" equals "experimental" to the extreme you could say that Debian or Slackware are "experimental" and I think not many things are further from the truth.

Fedora 7 is an impressive release, not impressive enough to replace Debian as my main GNU, but I'd still say it is the best out-of-the-box GNU/Linux distribution for the desktop right now.

Using the last guys logic (whom you replied to), no one should use OpenSuSE or Fedora because they're buggy riddled POS. Fedora is Red Hats community based distribution for their enterprise release, and OpenSuSE is the basis for Novells Desktop product (SLED SP1 for instance is based on OpenSuSE 10.1 plus patches).

Well, I don't think I'd have read quite such an extream view from his statement. However, yes it could have been cleaner.

I believe he was just saying SuSE was more stable than Fedora (I'm not sure if he was specifically refering to Open Suse, or the pay for distro).

If OpenSuse is to SLED, as CentOS is to RedHat EL, then yes, OpenSuse would be geared more towards a "static production environment", however if it is the same as Fedora, then I would say neither are applicable for a produciton environment (I'll clarify lower down what I mean by production).

Also, 'It is not recommended for production use' - who doesn't recommend it? some nameless person with a blog located at some place in the middle of no where? how do you define production? someone who needs 24/7 uptime and support, or merely someone who wants a distro for his or her desktop use?

Well, I suppose the first thing to clarify is the statement "production use" and what that actually means, as it is bandied about a lot, with out a defenition.

I've been working as a systems administrator for about 10 years now, in various companies. In that time "production use/ environment" has primarily come to mean long support cycles.

I want to be able to install a server, and know that once it is working, I can forget about it's upgrade cycle for a significant amount of time, but be confident that security erata is available.

Fedora, does not, has not, and will not provide this, and I don't want them to.

In addition to this, Fedora has released things that HAVE caused problems, migration to the 2.6 kernel was far from smooth, introduction of SElinux was atrocious (now, it's just fan dabby dosey), I don't want to have things like this thrown on to a "production system".

Kernel upgrades within releases for fedora have broken things quite spectacularly.

I think it boils down to the fact that "production environment" tends not to mean "dynamic", dynamic bad, static gooood.

However, for me on my desktop, at work and at home, fedora has proved to be excellent, desktop and laptop. So from that perspective it's absalutely fine.

Why do people equate 'community based distributions' as nothing more than 'experimental versions'? sure, these companies make up the majority of contributors. If people choose not to muck in and actually contribute, who sit outside these establishment, then why blame Red Hat or Novell? All these companies offer is a distribution based on the community version with long term support both software, telephone and consultancy. What the heck is wrong with that?

Erm, I think your going over board here, the discussion was Fedora and OpenSuSE, at no point in time have we mentioned "community based distrobutions", remember there are many other community based distro's out that other than fedora/ opensuse. Critasism's aimed at them has nothing to do with slackware for example.

Incorrect in case of CentOS which is a clone of RHEL. Fedora is actually the basis of RHEL and CentOS.


Not unique to Fedora as it affected early 2.6 kernel based distributions including Mandriva and SLED.

Edited 2007-06-07 10:20

But the thing is, both OpenSuSE and Fedora on a time based schedule; when OpenSuSE was released, it was a buggy riddled distribution, a few months later, it became more palitable. Same can be said for Fedora, a couple of months after its released, with a few updates, you'll find that its stability will improve.

But the same can be said for CentOS - have you looked at the tonnes upon tonnes of patches available for it - just as it has been released? Even so-called 'enterprise distributions' aren't immune to these issues.



No, OpenSUE is to SLED as Fedora is to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Its a community based distribution which the respective companies (Novell and Red Hat) base their enterprise distributions on. The only difference between the community vs. 'enterprise' is the level of support. Apart from that, they're exactly the same. So when you think about it, ask yourself, do you need the support provided by Red Hat or Novell? if not, you don't need an enterprise distribution.



Maybe it is best to refrain from using such open ended statements such as 'production ready'.



Then one could argue that what you should be saying is that you need *more* than just software, you need a complete package which includes support.

So therefore, the issue isn't with Fedora, but the fact that you need more than what Fedora provides. All Fedora provides is the software and support is left to the community. You need more than just community support.

So the issue isn't 'ready for production environment' it is "my needs and what the Fedora community can provide don't match up" - thats what should be said, not 'its not production ready' gives the message that Fedora is completely useless.

Edited 2007-06-07 11:31

Agreed.
Fedora is generally a stable and well-worked out OS, and if certain major bugs turn up, it shouldn't be taken for granted and co-define Fedora's identity as "not for production use". Instead, the bugs should be fixed.
It may not have as few bugs as CentOS or Debian Stable, but that doesn't mean that there is not a minimal level of stability that must be reached before Fedora can be released in the first place. and as far as I know, Fedora cares about that level.

As someone more or less biased in favour of Fedora, I wouldn't like people to say, 'let's forgive Fedora for this (say) major filesystem bug, after all it's not meant for production use.' That would make little sense.

Edited 2007-06-07 09:20 UTC

"""
Fedora is generally a stable and well-worked out OS, and if certain major bugs turn up, it shouldn't be taken for granted and co-define Fedora's identity as "not for production use".
"""

Typically, these discussions of whether Fedora is fit for production use or not go on and on, getting nowhere.

Rather than trying to apply broad labels, perhaps it is best to say that Fedora differs from other distros in that it:

1. Is intended to be a devlopers' playground and a showcase for cutting edge OSS technologies.

2. Comes with an absolutely huge update load.

Fedora issues an average of 130 updates per month.(!) And while I have used it extensively in production environments, one really does need to weigh the pros of Fedora against the relatively freewheeling attitude that its maintainers take regarding updates.

With, say, Centos/RHEL, the updates are *far* fewer, and only security updates are issued between quarterly update points. Typically, with CentOS/RHEL packages are patched with the security fix, whereas with Fedora, they just push out the latest point release of the package.

Often, in discussions about Fedora's suitability for production use, someone whips out Disney's, or some other large companies' use of Fedora in a production environment. It looks impressive at first. But then one has to consider that these organizations are large enough, and have resources enough, that they could outright fork Fedora and maintain their own branch if they wanted to. Not that they do. But they have those kinds of resources.

The real test, im my opinion, is how well it works for small time consultants like me.

If I wake up in the morning and find that a nightly update has broken something, I might have 5 calls on my answering machine from clients having problems, and I can't just call my IT department and have them whip up a quick patch. It's five broken servers, and just me and me alone trying to figure out what happened.

I should say that this does not happen often, but it does happen. Considering that volume of updates that Fedora pushes out, they do remarkably well. But I've slept better since I migrated a number of machines from Fedora to CentOS.

The moral? If you really need the features provided by Fedora in your production environment, it is usable. But if you don't you are likely better off with a more conservative distro.

Edited 2007-06-07 16:55