Posted 06/01/2007 at 02:09:31pm

..cherry, lemon, rocky road... I am not a seasoned Linux user by any means, but have used Red Hat (RH) in the past and now Fedora Core (FC). One of my questions has always been about how the different 'distros compare. Fedora claims that RH tweaks and improves many of the inner workings of the OS, supposedly as a test bed for their Enterprise version. So what gives ? Isn't Linux, Linux, or is there a bunch of incompatible flavors out there -- Can I actually take, for example, the latest FC kernel and plug it into Ubuntu ? How about taking a package that Ubuntu offers (and otherwise not included in the FC distro) and "installing" it into my current FC install? I would like to see how the different distros differ from each other, i.e. in general package contents, design (i.e. general desktop, workstation, scientific computing, etc), ease if use and compatibility with other distros (i.e. can you swapo packages from one distro to the other)... One of the main issues why Linux seems daunting to me is the fact that any given flavor may be popular today and not tomorrow... For example, right now I have FC6 installed, but FC7 about to come out. Do I absolutely need to upgrade, or will my packages continue to be updated to the latest if I stay in FC6, do I really gain much by upgrading or by switching to Ubuntu -- It is a bit of a pain to upgrade/switch distros... I would love to do w/out Windows ! Anyway, hope my 'noob questions are not too out of line. -NJ