CIS 206 U1 Discussion - Essay Example

Fedora Comparison to other Linux Distributions School Linux operating system has many distributions that come up with several operating systems. The major operating systems and distributions are Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and Red hat. Debian distribution produces operating systems like Ubuntu while Red-hat produces fedora and arch produce the Arch Linux. Other notable Linux distributions include OpenSuse, CentOS, Mint, Mandriva and Kali Linux formerly backtrack. In the text, we will focus on Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch Linux.

Fedora started in 2002 as a spun off from an undergraduate project called Fedora Linux and is supported by the open-source community. Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, that is on of the oldest Linux distributions available and is sponsored by Canonical. The features to look at in comparing the Linux distribution are stability, performance, software availability and installation, user interface and update support and release schedule. Fedora and Ubuntu are both stronger than Arch Linux. Ubuntu users have reported more application crashes that Fedora users.

The reason behind this is the high number of third party applications in Ubuntu. Therefore, Fedora is more stable than Ubuntu and Arch Linux. Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch Linux are very fast Linux distributions. Fedora has a high I/O performance than Ubuntu but on the other hand Ubuntu starts up quickly. From some test by OpenBenchmarking.org fedora 20 outperforms Ubuntu 13.10 when working with large number of files as in a business setting. Fedora scored 279.22 files/second as compared to 184.10/second files in Ubuntu.

Performance in graphical applications was almost similar in Fedora and Ubuntu of around 31.4 frames/second. Therefore, fedora outscores Ubuntu in performance. Hardware support in Linux is still a bigger problem than other commercial distributions like Windows and OS X. In Linux, Ubuntu has a better hardware compatibility than both arch and fedora, and different drivers will quickly work in it. Ubuntu outperforms both fedora and arch in software availability. Ubuntu has a lot of developers working on their applications, and it also supports personal package archives.

Fedora has a large library of applications but not as extensive as Ubuntu. Fedora uses a package manager called yum and rpm; Ubuntu uses apt-get and Deb while Arch Linux uses a package manager called Pacman. Arch Linux outperforms both Fedora and Ubuntu in building customized multimedia production workstation. Arch also has a user repository hundreds of user supported packages. All the distributions have constant updates and full dependency tracking. Fedora has an entirely different perspectives on software licensing.

Fedora supports free and open source software only while Ubuntu supports any propriety software that can run on it. Fedora uses a Gnome desktop environment while the latest Ubuntu releases have switched from Gnome to Unity desktop environment. Unity is beautiful and supports both 3D and 2D elements and has a very powerful notification system. Ubuntu comes out on top since Unity is more polished than Gnome. Fedora has a fast software release schedule than both Ubuntu and Arch Linux. Fedora has a new version every six months.

On the other hand, Ubuntu has two version releases each year. Ubuntu uses both Ubuntu LTS and Ubuntu standard release. Constant updates of Fedora mean that users get new features, fewer software bugs, and updated drivers on very regular basis. Ubuntu and Arch Linux works better for a personal environment since they are very user-friendly, easy to install and support a lot of software that many people migrating from other operating systems like windows are used to. Ubuntu is suited for personal software and also supports more games than fedora while arch supports a lot of multimedia application that might interest many people.

In a business setting, Fedora will be a better option due to its high stability and superior performance while handling large data files found in an enterprise environment.ReferenceFedora (2015). Comparison of Other Distributions. Retrieved from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Comparison_to_other_distributions