Red Hat vs. Fedora

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 10:54 -0700, Matt Graham wrote:
> From: Nathan England <nathan at paysonlinux.org>
> > If I decided I want to learn as much about Red Hat as possible, should I 
> > get an official Red Hat release or is Fedora similar enough that I could 
> > learn how Red Hat does things?
> 
> I believe what you want is CentOS.  That's essentially the same packages
> as RHEL without the RHEL artwork/branding and the whole RHN system.  
> CentOS is much less bleeding-edge than Fedora, and is reasonably easy to
> install and use.  Hope this helps,
----
CentOS is definitely less bleeding edge because it is built from RHEL
SRPM's and every attempt is made to be completely binary compatible with
RHEL. RHEL is definitely all about stable and packages rarely get
updated except on major release, security fixes and bug fixes.

I have in fact installed some CentOS RPM's on RHEL systems (shhh - don't
tell).

That said, it depends upon what you are trying to do.

If you just want a stable server, then RHEL or CentOS would be the right
thing.

If you want a desktop system, or even more specifically, a laptop system
with all the latest bells and whistles, then think of Fedora as a
preview of upcoming features in RHEL/CentOS. On my new Acer Aspire One,
I have Fedora 10 installed (easy/quick), no need to deal with arcane
stuff like madwifi and the built-in wireless, camera, suspend to disk
all work.

Craig