Want to use Fedora 15 (for GOME 3) until Ubuntu 11.10 releases, which Ubuntu applications are NOT available for Fedora?

Question

I'm a long time Ubuntu user but having Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 is really an issue for me as I can't adjust to it. However, GNOME 3 seems more intuitive than Unity. As currently, there's no reliable way to have GNOME 3 installed on base of Ubuntu 11.04, so I'd like to migrate to Fedora 15 until next release of Ubuntu, which will have full GNOME 3 support. Following are the points related to migration I'm unclear about.

• Which popular Linux software is NOT available to Fedora and is available to Ubuntu? (Any source of such list of applications would be great).
• I use Launchpad PPAs for latest versions of certain applications in Ubuntu, what is a PPA alternative in Fedora?
• Is "sudo" and "gksu" available?
• Does Fedora 15 supports read/write to NTFS and FAT file systems.
• Proprietary codecs are available? (like "ubuntu-restricted-extras" in Ubuntu).
• My laptop hardware has been supported out-of-the-box in versions of Ubuntu from 8.10 to 11.04 (which I have used so far). And that includes Intel integrated GPU as well, do I expect to face any issues in Fedora?

Answer 1

Well, Fedora in an old GNU/Linux distribution with very long tradition and is much older than Ubuntu.

To answer your question: Most of the software you'll find on Ubuntu except maybe some Ubuntu specific programs, you'll find on Fedora.

Next, sudo is standard Unix command and you can expect in on pretty much any GNU/Linux or Unix system. Same thing for gksu and systems which use GNOME.

Fedora doesn't include proprietary codecs with default settings, but it's very easy to find third party repositories which host everything you'll need.

For example, there's no out of the box support for Adobe Flash, but there's a guide here on how to get it.

As far as I know, Fedora had support for ntfs-3g for quite some time, so it should work fine.

As for laptop issues, I really can't help you there. You told us nothing about your laptop yet you expect us to tell you if it's going to work or not. In general, the answer is yes, it's going to work, but you could very well be one of the exceptions and encounter problems with bugs.