Fedora Helper

[denny]

If for some reason you have to use Fedora Core instead of a less braindead distribution (i.e. anything, as far as I can make out), particularly as a desktop, then you will undoubtedly find the following link extremely frustration-relieving:

http://brandonhutchinson.com/Fedora_Helper.html

Edit: go on then, while I've broached the subject here in my ventings, let's hear your recommendations for Linux distros (preferably with a why, but blind zealotry is also welcome) :) I've been a Debian fan for several years now, but I'm currently contemplating an exploratory mission into Gentoo territory.

The reason I'm using Fedora is that our work servers are Centos (I always wondered who used that, now I know), so we run Fedora on our desktops to give us something vaguely resembling a similar environment.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The lack of a well documented, officially supported and well integrated way to install proprietary binaries if you should wish to do so makes it a bit brain-dead, imho. Debian takes a few seconds to add 'non-free' to your sources file, and finding out that's what you need to do would take you less than five minutes of reading documentation or googling. Finding this thing for Fedora has taken me several searches over the last few weeks, and it doesn't seem to have any official standing or even widespread knowledge of its existence - I've read quite a few mailing list threads over the last few weeks for which this link would be the best answer, but it wasn't mentioned.

[babysimon]

I'm a happy (ish) Debian user at work and at home, but I can't see how non-free contains half that stuff. I don't think it has the win32 codecs, the DVD and MP3 support, Acrobat, (Sun) Java, and possibly others. Sure you can get these things in various ways, but I wouldn't call them official or (excepting debian-marillat) well-integrated.

I'm all for slagging off operating systems (they all suck really) but I want accuracy, dammit!

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I don't recall even having to venture as far as non-free for MP3 support in Debian - I thought that was standard?

You're right about the codecs and DVD stuff though, I was getting those from marilat - so I had to add a (well publicised) extra line to my sources file rather than one word.

I haven't yet figured out why anyone would want to install Acrobat :)