Debian is inferior to Fedora, according to the kernel.org sysadmin
 

Let me first say that I prefer Debian (Stable) for its stability and the UX, and my experiences with Fedora and RedHat were unpleasant: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ts-4175702324/

That's why I was surprised to hear the sysadmin for kernel.org (which hosts the Linux kernel source code) say "Why would you want to use Debian, when Fedora is clearly superior" during a talk about Qubes OS (as in "you can run Debian in it also, but why would you want to, when Fedora is clearly superior"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cU4hQg6GvU

Like I mentioned, my experience with Fedora/RedHat did not convince me that it's superior (by a long shot), but I like to keep an open mind and hear from people with other considered opinions. If you happen to agree with this statement, why do you think Fedora is superior to Debian?

It depends on your usage, and goals. Fedora is in a near constant state of change, bleeding edge, even though not considered a "rolling distribution", releasing on roughly a 6 month schedule, routinely upgrading kernels to newer releases at any time within its release cycles. Debian is the opposite, more like long term support, highly stable, released on a roughly 2 year schedule, stuck on the same nominal LTS kernel version for the life of the release. If you're constantly upgrading hardware to latest available, a long term support, stable release likely isn't going to provide the support you need. If you want something to just work with no surprises, trivial update processes, and you're not a gotta have the latest hardware user, Debian is probably the better choice. Indeed, Debian is the foundation for Ubuntu, Mint and a wealth of other distros. Both Debian and Fedora are among the best for their target users.

Right. But here's the thing. The comment he made was in the context of running Linux in a VM (which emulates your hardware of choice).

At 20:45:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cU4hQg6GvU&t=20m45s

Sounded to me like the Fedora statement was made with tongue in cheek.

I don't think he was being insincere. He mentions Fedora several times. This was just his one comment about Debian.

From what I saw of the video he mentions Fedora because the default template is Fedora and that is what he was running. I agree with mrmazda that it sounded like a tongue in cheek comment.

From my viewpoint comments are just his opinion and other then being a sysadmin for kernel.org he does not state what his actual linux expertise is. In my humble opinion your putting far to much thought into this.

FWIW, my experience with Debian is much, much better than with Fedora. Nowadays, it's not a direct experience though. What I currently use are CentOS 7/8 and Ubuntu 20.04. But I rebuild plenty of packages for them from Fedora Rawhide and Debian sid sources, respectively. Overall, Debian sources are much nicer to deal with.

It looks like Fedora has a small, very solid core of important packages tightly maintained by Red Hat employees and a long tail of sloppily maintained packages. But all those core packages are already part of CentOS, and I don't feel like updating them to newer versions than what CentOS provides precisely because they're important, so it's the tail packages I'm mostly left to deal with when rebuilding them for CentOS.

After dealing with Fedora source packages for some time, I think I understand why Red Hat felt Fedora was not enough of a foundation for RHEL, and made CentOS to its beta playground.

I think this is true of all distros.

For example:

* In RHEL/CentOS/Alma, you can't even install Okular (the best PDF viewer AFAICT) without running into issues: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ts-4175702324/

* On Debian, Chromium is old and virtually unmaintained: https://security-tracker.debian.org/...ckage/chromium ("Bullseye" is the current "stable" release -- 100 vulnerabilities!)

To some extent, sure. But in my experience, the core is smaller, and the tail is much longer on Fedora than on Debian, despite Fedora repos having fewer packages (~22000 in Fedora vs. ~35000 in Debian).

And the tail is quite differently structured. On Debian, that usually would be packages orphaned by their maintainers, or such where maintainer is MIA (missing in action) for long time. And there are established procedures in Debian project, both for adopting orphaned packages and for NMUs (non-maintainer uploads) as well as for package salvaging. Buggy, unmaintained packages regularly get removed from the repo.

On Fedora, I often see packages that routinely get automatically rebuilt by Fedora Release Engineering bot for newer releases from old sources seemingly without any quality control or human intervention whatsoever. The rule seems to be, if something can still be built from source, it will be in the repo, even if it's buggy and/or doesn't work as expected anymore.

It's clear you're either very misinformed, or a troll spreading FUD about Linux distributions, browsers and security across at least two forums:

https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=chromium

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=984013
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=996375

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/chromium

@cynwulf. Well, there's debbug #998732 for Chromium.

@OP. BTW, this is how the process of removing unmaintained packages works in Debian.

shruggy, yes I've seen that, but the point is - why is it unmaintained? The troll OP of this thread only seeks to highlight perceived deficiencies in Linux distros, please review their posting history.

Well, I didn't view the tube video.

But in my experience thus far, as a "Virtual Machine" or "Host", Fedora is better. Because it has been coming with lots of virtualization software and better kernel support for virtualization in the form of kernel configuration geared squarely in that direction since version 33, at the least anyway, I missed out on version 31 and 32.

I'm Debian hard, great all around distribution, server, desktop etc, but it's not as focused on virtualization like Fedora. Which in my opinion is well geared for virtualization on both sides of the fence as Host or Guest.

No one Linux is better than the other as far as I'm concerned.
They all use the same kernel and the bulk of the actual OS is from source available to all, used by most as a base.

Theoretically
You can put together a base Debian, add your own custom kernel mirroring Fedora's config, install all the same packages including Fedora specific (convert) and end up with a Defora.

Both, I'd say. It's easy to only listen to certain online channels that have a strong flow of mainstream opinions.
Get pulled into the bubble, which results in only ever seeing one side of any given situation, incl. "sources" etc.
Then go to some other place where you think you can generate a big splash with what you perceive to be the only valid POV.

All the while, the amount of actual expertise on the given subject is close to zero.
I say that without arrogance; my expertise isn't very high either - but I rarely subscribe to any given point of view wholesale.

BTW, counting bugs is not a very good metric. First of all, a bug means somebody actually reported it, so one could even argue that more bugs is better (because more people care & report); secondly, there's ways maintainers can keep the count (artificially) low.