Fair point, its my personal call, I should be asked to quantify. I personally have not had a good run with Fedora, and have found better smaller and faster desktops more useful for what we do here.
SUX was a really bad choice of words. I apologize. Fedora still seems focused on the server in my experience, and better desktop versions of
Fedora is developed by Red Hat. Red Hat want to sell you Enterprise Linux for your server. They pay most of the GNOME developers, lots of developers in projects like X.org and even a couple in KDE from memory. Short of perhaps Ximian/Novell, I don't think there is another company giving more to the Linux desktop efforts!
Linux exist. Mepis is a good example of a debian based desktop distro, and PClinux OS is a cut down, desktop focused version of mandrake which are a couple of good examples of taking a full distro, and focusing it on the desktop.
As much as I love Debian, I firmly believe no good can come from using Debian on the desktop. GNOME 2.6 is trying to break into Sarge this week, a couple of months after release, and it's really breaking things!
I found fedora to be much slower, and the desktop to not work as well, or to be as well laid out from a user point of view.
Agree with you wrt layout - it's about time that they fixed their menu structure! For FC3, the desktop devels are putting a lot of effort into increasing the speed, or at least the perceived speed, of the desktop. However, it uses the same components as any other desktop running GNOME, so I hardly think you can call it "much slower" than Mandrake running GNOME or JDS or whatever other comparable distro you prefer.
Redhats CEO's comments that Linux as not suitable for the desktop probably showed why their had been less attention to the desktop by Redhat in the past, and there still seems to be the same lack of attention to detail. There is no big issue, but IMHO, lots of little issues that make it less than it could be.
Red Hat's CEO said that Linux wasn't ready for home desktops yet, and until I can go and buy The Sims 4 on CD for Linux and have it work on all distros, it won't be. The amount of difference between distros is both a blessing and a curse.
And yes I thought JDS2 was a version that fedora could learn from, and Oliver seemed to like Gnome, so I suggested it. JDS 1 didn't impress me much, but JDS2 is looking a lot better. and it seems to be the only desktop linux based on fedora that I have seen so far in my travels.
JDS is based on SuSE. Remember, Sun don't like Red Hat. Have a look at http://cobind.com/desktop.html if you want, but to be honest I am completely sick of little offshoot distributions, especially if they don't maintain upstream compatibility - it creates more work for the developers, more "choice" that people have to fight through, when something that is a "Desktop Distro Based on Red Hat" could have been set up as a set of patches against a Fedora CD like Ximian Desktop was. (OK, actually Ximian Desktop was painful, and I don't think they'll ever do that again. But, submit your patches to your upstream source!)
What I meant to say was that for a desktop only install, better versions than fedora exist for out of the box desktops.
In what circumstance? For a business with 100 seats and an admin on site? For a home user who has never seen a command prompt? There are few distros with the wealth of third party packaging that the RPM communithy have. Debian are better in terms of having "apt-get install anything", but it's not necessarily kept as up to date.
Ironically we had a similar discussion about Lindows with another group last week, and noted that they wanted to be compared with fedora and mandrake, but not the specialist Linux Desktop Distros out there.
The only real reason there are specialist Linux Desktop Distros out there is so they can sell them to people in boxes. "Linux users" want a Linux that's not just a desktop - they want one that they can do everything with.
Lets face it, Windows both server and desktop versions, as does MAC OS X, So why are linux distros not willing to be server of desktop focused..... or even have 2 versions. ( and for my money, the ones in the best position is Novell with SUSE, Ximian and their own networking history... They could really make some cool linux distros.)
Fedora Core 2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Drive through. Craig