Show Notes
Plenty of sysadmins will tell you Fedora is a great desktop and the wrong choice for a server. Is that still true, or is it a reputation Fedora hasn't outgrown? This week it's just the two of us, and we put the question to ourselves.
We get into:
Where the hesitation actually comes from, and whether it describes the Fedora of today or the Fedora of a few years ago
What Fedora Server is, who it's for, and how it sits next to the image-based options
Whether bootc changes the math, when the OS is an image you build and roll back rather than a thing you upgrade in place
Fedora as an appliance, which Noah is seeing more of in industry, including one running inside a medical organization
Nine months of support, and what a live upgrade path would have to look like
Noah's argument that the thing standing between Fedora and a production server is not technical at all, it's a path of escalation, and that IT malpractice is a real category
We also go thoroughly off topic for a few minutes while Noah explains why ad targeting feels like your phone is listening to you, and why it isn't. Eric calls it out on air. We left it in.
No guest this week. Just the two of us arguing in good faith and mostly landing on "it depends."
So we want your answer. Would you run Fedora on a server, and why or why not? Bonus points if you have actually done it in production. Comments, the Matrix room, or, as Noah correctly points out, RFC 1149. Links: Fedora Server
Fedora Server documentation
Fedora bootc documentation
FP054 BootC in the Wild
FP062 What is Hummingbird
RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers
More from Fedora Project Podcast
Red Hat announced Hummingbird at Summit back in May. Five months later there are Hummingbird containers in the wild, a spin of Fedora Linux built on the same principles, and a full Bluefin ISO built on top of it.
Framework does not have a storefront you can walk into. What they do have is a laptop you can order that arrives with Fedora already on it, and a screwdriver in the box.
Fedora has a job whose entire purpose is the health of the community around the distribution, and this month a new person took it over. So we got both of them on at once.
A couple of episodes ago we talked to Carl George about EPEL, and half that conversation ended up being about CentOS. The questions kept coming, so we made a whole episode out of it.
Fedora is a huge project with a lot of doors in. In this episode Eric and Noah walk through the different ways to find your people in Fedora, from real time chat on Matrix to long form discussion on Fedora Discourse, reading Fedora Magazine, getting a friendly hand from the Join SIG, and catching up on project wide activity through This Week in Fedora. If you have ever wondered where to start, this one is for you.