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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why this is based on Fedora. Isn’t that more of a desktop distro…? And this seems more aimed at virtual machines running on EC2…? Or am I missing something?

It’s also interesting that at the same time Amazon is sponsoring Rocky Linux: https://rockylinux.org/sponsors/ (Which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.)

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"Our release cadence (new major version every 2 years) best lines up with a highly predictable release cadence of an upstream distribution such as Fedora."

"We believe that having Fedora as upstream allows us to meet the needs of the customers that we talked to in terms of flexibility and pulling in newer packages."

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/qzxkh3/comment/hlptw7l...

Stability is important but less and less people seem to want to run 4 year old software.

I think it depends quite a bit on the circumstances.

And as long as the kernel is decently fresh, one can run new shiny software using containers instead.

It depends on how do you define stability. Fedora packages are very stable in terms of bugs, but the problem of changes between versions might cause extra work. However, many run their services in containers anyway, and you can use the latest packages on your host.

Fedora has a server edition, and everything in RHEL/CentOS is old

> and everything in RHEL/CentOS is old

This is the whole reason why people use CentOS and Debian as server side old stable and most importantly security patch. if you need your dev stack as newest version just installed it on the old stable OS base so you can worry only on your dev stack.

Speaking as an ex-platform engineer, we needed to be on much newer kernel versions to leverage ebpf and other modern features

The Oracle UEK wasn't an option?

Oracle was never an option.

I kinda dragged Oracle's UEK over the coals for xxhash. That was a red herring.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/btrfs-centos-living-loo...

> CentOS and Debian as server side old stable and most importantly security patch

Historically, CentOS has been very slow to release security patches, compared to upstream (RHEL). And for anything non-critical (but still often high) Debian stable tends to receive fixes a lot later than unstable, and sometimes never due to need to backport.

Not completely true since the introduction of module packages. You can now get more up-to-date packages within CentOS Stream/RHEL.

Fedora is the source and integration space for many things these days, not just the Fedora Workstation any more. Its the upstream for RHEL/CentOS but also has a ton of editions and spins, including Fedora CoreOO, Fedora IoT, Fedora Silverblue, etc.

No, Fedora is general purpose.

Source: Fedora developer, previously employed at Red Hat as a Linux packager.

Fedora works badly on Raspberry PI.

Fedora is the upstream for RHEL, and was the upstream for CentOS. While many folks use Fedora as a desktop OS alternative to Ubuntu, Fedora was not designed with desktops in mind.

You are correct saying it is designed for EC2 instances, as it is the de facto default image for EC2 instances, despite many folks choosing an Ubuntu image instead.

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