Stuck between a Debian and Fedora place

[ThoughtVelocity]

Let me start off by saying this is my personal test and the opinions expressed and are just that opinions!

After using both for quite a while now I have come to the following "personal convictions" regarding Debian and FC4 on my Dell laptop.

1. I like the way Fedora looks better than Debian. It just has more polish. I have tried to get Debian to look as nice, but it always seems to be lacking. Fedora also recognized the correct video settings right away while Debian took a bit to get working. KDE on FC4 is very bland however. But I mainly use Gnome so It's not an issue.

2. Package management goes to Debian. Apt is the best for me period. Yum has gotten pretty good but the lack of unity between repos an imcompatibility is annoying at the least.

3. Wireless worked out of the gate with FC4 whereas Debian took a bit of tweaking. Once I got it figured out it did work. It took about a week though.

4. Debian boots faster and seems to be quicker overall with both Gnome and KDE. FC4 takes forever to boot, but I realize there is some tweaking I ca to do with services to get it better.

5. FC4 doesn't come with anything a normal user would wants. DVD, MP3, java, flash. No of it works right away, you have to go find it. I was able to get it all running, but it just adds more setup time. with Debian it's all about apt.

6. FC4 takes forever to install, Debian is lightning fast.

7. The Debian menu in Gnome is horrible. Fedora's menu setup is very clean and well organized.

8. Sound card setup in both is very problematic. It doesn't seem that anyone can get this quite right. I was able to get alsa working quicker in Debian than FC4 though.

9. Getting files from my Windows desktop to my Debian laptop worked out of the box with Debian, whereas Fedora took me about 2 hours to configure, and I still don't know how I go it to work. Fedora looks geared to use cifs in the future wheras Debian uses samba. For whatever that's worth.

I am really torn between the two. If anyone knows a good blend between the two I would love to hear about it.

[budman7]

I am really torn between the two. If anyone knows a good blend between the two I would love to hear about it.

I personally recommend dual-booting.
I can never decide between all of the distros in my sig so I keep all of them.

[bryansmith]

I am really torn between the two. If anyone knows a good blend between the two I would love to hear about it.

I personally recommend dual-booting.
I can never decide between all of the distros in my sig so I keep all of them.

Exaclty. If you like both, use both. I can't decide between Debian (which I just installed) or PC-BSD. So I intend on having both.

Bryan

[a thing]

DVD-patents
MP3-patents
Java-Built in. You can't run OpenOffice or Eclipse without it.
Flash-Proprietary, until GPLFlash2 is stable
Yum-yum -y install synaptic or yum -y install apt.
Samba-Run system-config-securitylevel and disable the firewall.
Startup-system-config-services
Install time-Debian only installs a base system like FreeBSD. The rest is up to you. Fedora installs it all at once.

[bryansmith]

Install time-Debian only installs a base system like FreeBSD. The rest is up to you. Fedora installs it all at once.

That is not all true. Sarge comes with OOo. Plus, Fedora is a little bloated. Sometimes it is nicer to install want you want afterwards. Also, apt beats yum anyday. True, you can get apt for Fedora but even then it is inferior to the real apt.

Bryan

[aysiu]

Have you tried Blag? It's based on FC3, but it comes with Synaptic/apt-get as the default packaging system.

[a12ctic]

debian>FC

[Dapper Dan]

Apt-get RPM for Fedora works just as well as apt-get Debian, only Debian has more packages to choose from. I run Fedora on several boxes. If it weren't for apt-get RPM, I'd likely use a different distro (on those boxes...).

[ThoughtVelocity]

I have used apt withFC4 but it is slowly losing support in the Fedora community to yum. I realize I can dual boot but it would be nice to just have one. Is there a way to install debs on FC? It seems that iremember something like that. Or even to use the debian repos with FC. I realize probably not but that would be ideal! I would think there could be some way to tweak the FC system to make it enough like debian to install from the main debian repos.

[borromini]

Why would you like to do that? Between Fedora and Debian there are some differences in file structures, dependencies, ... Installing debian progs doesn't solve that for you, it will just make it worse. I do suppose there is something like deb2rpm though (maybe alien can do the job?).