One of the problems of the Fedora world is that you get a box installed and a few months later you have to immediately upgade it. And upgrading can be a pain especially with yum and non standard repo configurations.
So I was more than exuberant when Ubuntu came with Long Term Support. I could apt-get myself for the next 5 years without a problem, and then upgrade my distribution when I get around to it, not when I’m forced into it the way Fedora does support.
One thing about Fedora that I don’t quite understand is the transferring of support to Fedora Legacy. Why not just roll up the supporters in Fedora Legacy into Fedora?
That said, there are a few things were fedora does some things right.
Fedora believes in shipping packages with a working configuration. It’s up to you to turn them on during startup using chkconfig.
Ubuntu believes in shipping packages with a not-necessarily working configuration, you have to hunt through the config files to figure out what line to uncomment to get a working distribution and it varies from package to package.
NTP for instance, one just needs to modify /etc/ntp.conf. SASL requires you to modify /etc/default/saslauthd, etc.
I think both Ubuntu and Fedora are trying to be “Secure By Default”. I think Fedora does it better though.
I haven’t found a way in ubuntu to save off your IPTables configuration. Fedora has “/etc/init.d/iptables save”. Fedora then reloads it before brining up the interfaces. FIOS needs the line that clamps TCP to a smaller MSS since my FIOS has a smaller MTU than ethernet.
Also Ubuntu shipped with a broken sendmail. Yes yes yes, I know I should be on postfix, but I have a working sendmail config and I don’t want to muck with it. /var/spool/mqueue had the wrong permissions, and the /etc/mail/Makefile system is broken.
I read somewhere that Ubuntu server is the server “done right.” Nope. Not yet.
