As of this last Friday, December 7th Fedora Core 6 is no more. With it goes the last release the Fedora Project had seen the split between “Community” (Extras) and Red Hat sponsored (Core). Those not intimately involved in Fedora might be interested to learn that when the merge happened it was the core packages that ended up having to follow the former “Extras” packaging guidelines and not the other way around. Yet another testament to the power of community.
Fedora often takes a bit of flack over not maintaining a longer release / support cycle. I think the main reason for this is simply because it allows Fedora to take bigger risks then any other operating system out there. By releasing often (now every 6 months) we can take any number of large risks. The worst case is having to fix it during the next release in 6 months, the best case is we integrate yet another killer technology before anyone else. Having been involved in Fedora for about 2 years I can say, 6 months is not very long.
At the same time not having to worry about updates for very long (current release + 1 release + 1 month) allows our developers to be more focused on innovation. Other groups and businesses are taking note of this as well as they integrate software into Fedora. It has become the perfect platform for a company to present new software to the world. Our setup allows us to be incredibly dynamic.
I think it’s best not to think of Fedora as a stand alone distribution but rather as part of a family of Red Hat compatible products. I mean that in terms of the technical specifications, not Red Hat the company. When Fedora is combined with RHEL and CentOS that family can fit into just about any market imaginable and I think that’s the key to the success of each of these distributions.
Fedora 9 is on the horizon and the recently announced FUDCon will be even more exciting then the last one. Those interested in helping just check out: http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora
That is a shame I really liked Fedora 6. I upgraded it to fedora 8 and it is really bad, yes I know it loads faster but the codec buddy is so bad I am going to Ubuntu..
Once you get it installed let me know how that works for you (seriously).
Congrats on the retirement. The speed of the distribution is one reason why I tend to use it for development.
This means it is probably time for me to upgrade that Fedora Core 4 system I still have running in production (behind several firewalls)....Yikes.
In practice, the Fedora release schedule means many people just skip releases. FC6 was pretty good, so many had no reason to install F7 when it first came out, but as FC6 approached EOL, they go for F8. It would be interesting to see some statistics for the number of people using each Fedora release.
I think most users look at whether their hardware is supported and whether they want to pay for support or rely on a community for support.
There is still a lot of FUD over switching from a distro that has worked for you in the past. Few people see RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora as a family of related distros, so they are more likely to move from/to Fedora to/from Ubuntu or Debian unstable, CentOS to/from Debian stable, RHEL to/from SUSE or even Apple OS X. I like to think of the RH "family" as an ecosystem where Fedora is a rapidly mutating weed or virus where new things are tried out. RHEL/CentOS is the durable higher organism that only incorporates the ideas after their merit is proven and the glitches (including security issues) fixed.
I mostly agree with George. Most people see Fedora and RHEL/CentOS as different animals even if thought they both come from essentially the same place.
The six month release schedule is hardly unique. It's what Ubuntu does, for example. There are distros that release even more frequently. I used to think that was a good thing but I've since changed my mind. I've migrated away from both Fedora and Ubunutu because there were simply too many annoyances and bugs in each release. In all fairness I have not tried FC8 yet. I'm honestly not sure I ever will.
Thats exactly the point about the Red Hat "family" of products. Fedora and RHEL/CentOS aren't the same thing. Fedora ain't your grandma's OS. Its brand new every time, its a different tool for a different job. Everyone I've ever heard of who's said "I moved away from Fedora to RHEL and probably won't go back" might as well be saying "I've moved away from the laser level to a hammer and probably won't go back."
They're different tools for different jobs. Unfortunately we live in a world where stability and new technology don't always mix. Admin's have to understand, in great detail, the problem they're trying to solve. Once they understand the problem, they can pick the right tool for that job. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something :P
George: You were curious about usage numbers. I've posted this:
http://mmcgrath.fedorapeople.org/fedorausage.png
Thats an average over a 24 hour period of mirror hits. Its tricky to view because yum (which contacts the mirror list) has changed its behavior over time. For example the big dip in August for Moonshine was because yum implemented caching so it didn't hit the mirror list every time. Its interesting to see over time though. Also interesting to me is that FC6's EOL announcement didn't seem to change the number of people using FC6 that much.... Scary.
It's a shame as their multi-cds went away now they are forcing everyone to upgrade their 1990's systems that can't even handle DVD drives... Then to boot the x86_64 is a waste :( Gentoo is a better way to go on anything 64bit related. My two cents!