First Impressions Of Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle”

 #Blog2012, Computational Journalism Server, Linux, Linux Desktops, Platform as a Service  3 Responses »
May 122012
 

As I’ve noted recently, I’m in the process of migrating the Computational Journalism Server towards a full Platform as a Service offering. To that end, my development environments now run the three major Linux community desktops – Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora. I’m writing a bunch of convenience scripts so I can operate them all in a similar matter, and I run all three distros with the GNOME 3 GNOME shell.

This week, I upgraded from the stable Fedora 16 to the beta Fedora 17. For a beta, Fedora 17 is remarkably stable. There were no major issues with either of my machines, unlike Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which required some video hacking to run on my workstation. The desktop, like previous Fedora desktops, is mostly standard GNOME issue, unlike Ubuntu’s.

I still prefer openSUSE green to Fedora blue, but that’s easily changed. In short, if I wanted to, I could make this my main desktop rather than openSUSE without a major learning curve or intensive customization. I couldn’t do that on Ubuntu, even using Ubuntu’s GNOME 3 GNOME shell.

On the laptop, Ubuntu and openSUSE both support “powertop” and “cpupower” / “cpufrequtils” for managing the processor frequency. Fedora has “powertop” but I couldn’t find a tool to set the power governors and ended up writing a Perl script to do that on Fedora. Neither Ubuntu nor Fedora appears to have a comprehensive system configuration GUI tool set like the one openSUSE provides with YaST2.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing on servers, since that’s usually done by editing configuration files and running command-line tools. Still, there are thousands of annoying differences in what configuration files are called and where they live among the three distributions. Fedora’s tools in the “system-config-*” packages are better than anything I could find in Ubuntu.

Moving on to documentation, I’d rate Fedora the highest among the three. For example, this page clearly documents what you need to do to run OpenStack Essex on Fedora 17. I couldn’t find anything for Essex on openSUSE at all, and Ubuntu’s documentation was written by a third party, not the Ubuntu community. For where I am now in the Computational Journalism Server project, documentation is more important than anything except underlying operating-system-level quality.

As far as I’m concerned, all three distributions are solid under the hood. They all track security isses and issue bug fixes promptly, they all run on reasonable hardware configurations without much hassle, they all appear to have solid communities and solid financial backing.Under the hood, Linux is Linux is Linux.

But on the developer’s desktop, it’s the little things that matter. Ubuntu’s “consumer-oriented” Unity desktop put me off instantly. Even when I installed GNOME shell to get my preferred desktop, the color scheme was annoying and the workflow wasn’t as smooth as it is with openSUSE and Fedora. That puts Ubuntu at the bottom.

Overall, I’d rate Fedora 17 slightly better than the current stable openSUSE, 12.1. There’s more software packaged in the Fedora base, including some of the CRAN library packages for R. The documentation is better on Fedora, but the system administration GUI tools are better on openSUSE.

Will I switch? That’s a tough call. openSUSE isn’t standing still; there’s a beta of 12.2 scheduled for release the same week as Fedora 17 stable. If Fedora has anything like SUSE Studio or openSUSE Build Service, I haven’t found it. So most likely I’ll blow away the Ubuntu partitions and start testing openSUSE 12.2 beta. Still, Fedora 17 is a solid working Linux desktop and I’ll be using it more as time passes.

First Impressions of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”

 #Blog2012, Computational Journalism, Linux  7 Responses »
May 052012
 

First of all, let me put this in perspective. I’ve been using Linux on workstations and laptops since Red Hat Linux 6.2. I stayed with Red Hat all the way through Red Hat Linux 9. When Red Hat split the distribution into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core in 2003, I switched to Debian. I ran Debian for about six months, then switched to Gentoo Linux. In the summer of 2008, I switched to openSUSE Linux and I’ve been on openSUSE since then.

Every time one of the major community Linux distributions ships a new stable release, I try it out. So far, none of the Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Mint releases has come out significantly better than openSUSE, so I’ve stuck with it. And that remains true for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”. If that were the end of the story, I could close this blog post now. But it’s not.

If you’ve been following this blog and my Twitter stream and Github account, you’ll know that I’ve been collecting tools for computational journalism and packaging them as appliances. And I’m moving on towards a Platform as a Service. One of the requirements I’ve put on that is that the tools should be distribution-agnostic as much as possible. Up to now, everything has been on openSUSE because of the SUSE Studio appliance construction tools and to a lesser extent the openSUSE Build Service package repositories. But I’ve come to the point where I need to make things work on Fedora and Ubuntu.

So I’ve quad-booted my laptop (Windows, openSUSE, Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 12.04). And I’m trying to triple-boot my workstation with openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu. Which brings us to the first problem – openSUSE and Fedora installed cleanly on the workstation, but Ubuntu 12.04 didn’t. In particular, the Ubuntu desktop doesn’t even come up on a 1024×768 monitor!

I can understand Linux not coming up on a wireless card that’s relatively new. I can understand Linux having trouble with a touchpad or with audio. After all, the hardware makers design for Windows and Apple, not Linux desktops / laptops. But a 1024×768 monitor that’s run everything from Gentoo / WindowMaker to KDE 3.5 to KDE 4 to GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 and LXDE and Cinnamon on openSUSE? A 1024×768 monitor that runs Fedora 16 without any problems? That’s just plain wrong!

I did get the Ubuntu desktop working on the laptop, which is a much newer configuration. I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on how ugly the desktop actually is when it works. That’s been covered in numerous places and desktops are

  1. A matter of personal taste, and
  2. Customized to the user’s workflow.

But for someone who, like me, is used to the GNOME 2 desktop as delivered in previous versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, the openSUSE customization of GNOME 2 and the current clean implementations of GNOME 3 on openSUSE and Fedora, Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is jarring. And it’s really hard to figure out how to do things, where stuff is, and so on.

Moreover, the whole distribution is “pushy” – it’s hawking subscriptions to Ubuntu One cloud music, for example. The software installer has favorite apps, and so on. It’s like having a Kindle Fire or an iPad or visiting the Chrome Web Store or Google Play – the Ubuntu desktop is trying to sell you something every time you move your mouse. Ubuntu has turned the Linux desktop into just another media consumption device!

That’s two strikes – annoyances but not deal-breakers. But what I want to do with Fedora and Ubuntu is use them as hosts for virtual appliances, just like I use openSUSE and Windows / VirtualBox now.. In openSUSE and Fedora, I can go into the software installer and select a “pattern” and get everything I need to do that. If Ubuntu has that, it’s well hidden under the games and the productivity suites and the media apps. Sure, I can go find how to do that on Ubuntu on the web, but it seems to be going against the grain of the distribution. It only took me two minutes to find it on Fedora after almost four years of working daily on openSUSE!

I’m sure “Precise Pangolin” is a fine distribution “under the hood.” The previous long-term support version, 10.04, is an acknowledged workhorse in servers along with Debian, RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux and SLES. I have to test on it, and I’ll figure out how to be productive at it. But if Canonical can’t come up with a desktop built for Linux professionals like me, they’re going to lose us.