Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 10

We came across a post from last week comparing the features of the upcoming Fedora 11 with the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 and decided that the comparison was worth making. Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, scheduled to be released April 23th, followed on May 26th by Fedora 11, codenamed Leonidas.

In version terms, Fedora is ahead. Kernel 2.6.29 vs. 2.6.28, Firefox 3.1 instead of 3.0, Thunderbird 3.0 instead of 2.0, OpenOffice 3.1 vs. 3.0 and filesystem ext4 instead of ext3. Both ship with Gnome 2.26, KDE 4.2 and XFCE 4.6. But, we admit, new versions are not always better. Well, they are, that is the point. But sometimes new features result in new problems.

Fedora is cutting edge. They are always going for better features, but despite what some critics say, that doesn’t always mean instability. Ubuntu’s focus is ease of use, not that Fedora in our opinion doesn’t have that as well, but it is Ubuntu’s most attractive feature to most…it focuses on ease of use for new users. Many features first tested in Fedora now are part of Ubuntu.

Today, Phoronix released the results of its tests of the betas of each of the new distributions. Ubuntu, as of now, won 10 out of 15 of the tests they used, although they admitted that development builds of Fedora have debugging options enabled, which may slow its overall performance. We agree a more definitive result will be interesting once the two are in final release. Hopefully they’ll wait a few weeks after both are issued, to iron out any early issues.

All Linux distributions have their issues. Take this blog post we found from one dissatisfied Linux tester who tried out a LiveCD. An issue with a network card, one likely easily fixed with a simple keyword search online, turned the author off to adopting the Linux lifestyle. But, compared to years ago, when everything had to be manually configured, 99% of hardware works under Ubuntu, Fedora, or the other major distributions out of the box. It has been a goal of them to get to this point.

Many improvements are coming under the hood, so to speak. More efficient booting is a goal on both distributions, as is adoption of the ext4 filesystem and new versions of various softwares they have in common. We’ll be watching, either way.

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