Views from an Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Fedora migrator

[Digimer]

I'm seeing a lot of consternation with Ubuntu surrounding the 12.10
release. I thought I'd throw my $0.02 out there for people to read or
discard as they see fit.

I started as a Red Hat user (pre-RHEL/FC split). I didn't like where Red
Hat was going around the RH8 ~ RH9 days, so I switched to Debian. Of
course, Debian and and always has been a server distro, so when Ubuntu
came along in '05, I decided to give it a go.

Like many, many others, I was converted. I was a die-hard Ubuntu user
for a long time and many non-geek friends and family still use the
Ubuntu machines I built for them.

When I started going down the clustering road, I spend countless hours
trying to make it work on Debian and Ubuntu. First I switched to CentOS
on the servers, but stuck to Ubuntu for my desktop. I still had bad
memories of my former Red Hat end-days and was extremely reluctant to
try Fedora.

In the end, I switched back around Fedora 13. There were the usual
growing pains of getting used to the way Red Hat / Fedora did things,
but I got used to it quickly enough. Now, after about two years of solid
Fedora use, I am a pretty big fan again.

Fedora is *far* from perfect. It's got plenty of sharp corners and more
than a few grumpy community members, but when I go back to Ubuntu for
one reason or another, I remember why I love it. For all it's wrinkles,
it strikes me as a real open source community.

In a way, I feel bad for Canonical. They need to pay the bills and I can
only imagine how big their bills are. However, they've gone about it in
a way that is, I think, something of a slap in the face of open source.
To default-bundle ads, to put up a skull (cute as they may have tried to
make it) when you don't offer them money is offensive. Yes, they have
invested in a tremendous amount of overhead, but there are countless
contributors on top of whom's work they build their OS.

Anyway, my purpose was to say; If you are unhappy with Ubuntu, give
Fedora a try. If you are happy with Ubuntu, and if you want to support
Canonical, that's totally understandable, too. There is no denying that
they've been wonderful for open source adoption.

-- 
Digimer
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