The history of Yum

Does anyone remember how early versions of yum were horrible? I had switched from Fedora 7 to openSUSE 10.3 back in the days because suse guys launched Zypper which was superior to Yum back then, but please don’t kick me out from this form for this act :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::grin:

I remember early versions of yum. I’ve been using Fedora since Fedora Core 1 so yeah.

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A little off-topic, but I wonder. Since you were in Fedora since day 1 (FC1) and Fedora was released before Ubuntu (Fedora in 2003, Ubuntu in mid-2004 I believe), I would like to ask you your opinion on why did Ubuntu catch so much media attention and fanfare, and why did its popularity explode when Fedora was already a really nice distro.

Mind you, I tried very briefly FC7 in 2007 and I felt its design was better than Ubuntu’s, and revising the history of both distros, I would say Fedora used to look better most of the time. Internally, both were very good (Fedora used SELinux in the beginning, which I believe was pretty rough back then), and it seems APT was much better than YUM (but I believe this was only in the beginning, as Ubuntu had online repositories and Fedora did not, so you had to grab packages one by one). What’s your take in all this?

For me, my first exposure to Ubuntu is when I need to update a mailscanner instance running in the cloud. That was 10 years ago.

At that time, “solution based” document for Ubuntu is readily available.

I just need two documents - first to update the OS in place and the second to refresh the required package for the mailscanner to run. (Basically a reinstall from the beginning, then reuse old config as much as possible)

Even for me without any Ubuntu experience can get it done.

At that time, there are lots of docs talking about how to deploy Ubuntu in the cloud. But I cannot remember any for Fedora.

Follow Clouds popularity exploding, Ubuntu become the gold standard for small business starting to use the cloud.

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I’d say that having mp3 decoding and nvidia drivers installed by default did help a lot. Also, I remember that you could request an install CDROM to be sent to your (physical) mailbox for free.

When Yum first came out, I think I was using apt-rpm at the time and kept using it for a while.