Fedora 17: Beefier Than Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

[Teho]

Again, given the lack of credible usage numbers

I think we have every reason to believe that Ubuntu is the most popular destop Linux out there:
-It's searched the most in Google.
-It's talked about the most in Twitter, blogs and news sites.
-Ubuntu.org is by far the most visited Linux distribution site (looks like it has a lot more visits than all other combined) according to Alexa.
-It has the biggest forums (8 times more members than both openSUSE and Fedora forums combined).
-It's has actual hardware parters and computers with Ubuntu preinstalled can be bough from Dell and some Chinese vendors.
-Canonical reports ~20 000 000 Ubuntu installs.

[devius]

Here's the thing, given the lack of credible information, the only two means to somehow measure market share is Google trends and Distrowatch, and both are severely broken.

Maybe the best way to get a somewhat credible number would be to get the number of unique machines accessing each distro's repository, like what google does with Android. The problem is that it would require that all (or a very large percentage) of the available mirrors provide this info and tracking mechanism.

Beyond that, Mint, OpenSUSE and Fedora (just to name a few) are just as easy to use as Ubunutu and both are used by millions and are just as worthy to be the Linux yardstick as Ubunutu. (Again, given the lack of credible usage numbers).

I can imagine that Ubuntu is more used mainly because it has much more related sites and blogs than what we can find for other distros. This is a good indication that it's popular, although by how much is hard to tell.
On the "easy to use" argument I couldn't agree more. Before software center I could never understood why people said that Ubuntu was "easy to use" when AFAICT Fedora was exactly the same but in a blue hue. Nowadays Software Center does make it easier to discover and install applications, and Unity is different from what you get in other distros, but other than that there's not much difference. I use Ubuntu now, after a few years with Fedora and openSUSE, mainly because of Unity (yes, that's right: Unity) and software center.

[bwat47]

Fedora 17 is an all around great release, I just switched from 12.04 to fedora the other day. Much snappier, and boots faster too.

[Nevertime]

These seem like extreme results... does a slightly newer kernel and a newer gcc really explain this? Is unity hogging resources? I've notice on my laptop Ubuntu feels much snappier under gnome 3 than unity.

[1c3d0g]

I'm using Fedora 17 as well (KDE spin, of course), and it's snappier than most other distributions. I would like to see them compared to OpenSUSE (and if possible, Debian unstable) though, just to get an idea how the "Big 3" (or "Big 4") perform against each other. I'm sure Arch will probably win the race anytime, but like someone said before, it's not an easy distro to set up and since it's bleeding edge, it's prone to some packages misbehaving/crashing altogether. i remember KDE crashing quite a few times when I used Arch. Don't know if it got better since then.

[gregzeng]

So many 'buntus are NOT the one Ubuntu/ Unity. I use other derivations: Mint 12.04 & Xubuntu. If Pinguy ever considers 12.04 stable, I might return to either Ultimate or Pinguy.

I disagree with Canonical on so many things. Thunar is the best file manager IMO - so many "rename file" choices unavailable in all other similar products. Opera browser is by far THE best web browser, which Canonical totally ignores.

The biggest SNAFU is that Canonical loads junk fonts onto my English-only systems.; USA Imperialism (Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Korean, Vietnamese). Most 'buntus ignore Unetbootin, EXT4, Google Chrome, You Tube, etc.

The worst part of USA-imperialism is their crazy anti-scientific systems: INCHES, "Letter-sized" paper. So ethnocentric. No other nation exists on planet Earth except the pre-metric USA.

[ninez]

These seem like extreme results... does a slightly newer kernel and a newer gcc really explain this? Is unity hogging resources? I've notice on my laptop Ubuntu feels much snappier under gnome 3 than unity.

having your system (ie: software, kernel, etc) compiled with a newer GCC version could yield these results on it's own, assuming the newer version is better. Then, when you add improvements in the kernel, libs, etc the gap could easily widen.

Fedora also doesn't patch (seemingly) half of the system, the way Ubuntu does. For example, To compile/use Unity in Archlinux requires 80 packages to be patch and re-compiled with Ubuntu-specific patches. I doubt Unity itself is causing all of these benchmarks to be less (ie: it shouldn't really affect many of them), but i wouldn't be surprised if some of their downstreaming patching has impeded performance in the odd place.

This is why i tend to agree (on the one hand) that Ubuntu isn't the best gauge to see where linux/OSS is at, at least in terms of the software itself. IE: Fedora is much closer to upstream than Ubuntu (other distros such as Archlinux are also much closer to the upstream/vanilla experience). but by the same token, as Michael pointed out it is the most popular and thus should to some degree be used as a gauge.

[Fenrin]

[...]
-Ubuntu.org is by far the most visited Linux distribution site (looks like it has a lot more visits than all other combined) according to Alexa.
[...]

no I don't agree with this point. If I enter ubuntu.org, it's acctually redirected to http://www.ubuntu.upc.edu, which isn't even a linux distribution site

(the correct url is: http://www.ubuntu.com/)

[allquixotic]

Fedora also has a newer kernel, newer Xorg, etc. So of course it's going to have the latest features and be the fastest.

But for once I can't use Fedora on my desktop, because I spent like 8 hours trying to fix installing Fedora in UEFI+GPT mode on my Ivy Bridge desktop, to no avail. I even tried to get some folks in #fedora to help, but everyone completely ignored my query.

Basically, I have a hardware RAID controller joining together two 4TB hard drives into an 8TB array (striped). The first three partitions are (in this order) EFI System Partition, Reserved Windows partition, and NTFS partition for Windows. Then immediately following that is another EFI System Partition, then my Linux root filesystem (ext4), then /home, then /. I tried installing Fedora 17 in this configuration and I get the "minimal BASH-like editing" prompt from GRUB, and the version of GRUB appears to be GRUB1 (wtf?). When I changed to Ubuntu 12.04, using the same partition setup but wiping out the partitions, it works like a charm. My BIOS lets me choose the boot order of the OSes and shows Windows and Ubuntu separately so I can prioritize them in the list. And I can pick one on the fly during boot-up by pressing F8.

So I'm going to act like a little baby and say that Fedora 17 sucks (for me on my current hardware; I'm a huge fan of it otherwise) because it wasn't tested with UEFI+GPT setups and appears to fail epically where Ubuntu succeeds.

[Teho]

(the correct url is: http://www.ubuntu.com/)

Yes of course Here's the link: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ubuntu.com