Some review of Fedora 7. First, eWeek concludes: "We were impressed to see how amenable to customization this popular Linux-based operating system has grown." Linux.com also reviews Fedora 7. "Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable "spins" of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect." Update: Two more Fedora articles, a review and a news article.
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Member since:2005-07-24
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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".
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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
Member since:
2006-08-09
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