Redhat Fedora is my preferred Linux distro, partly because I like the design philosophy behind their tools, partly because Redhat as a company is less harmful than most, and partly because the company makes an effective leader for the Linux world. By and large I like the technical directions they've taken their distro over the many years it's been around (previously just as Redhat Linux). They have made a few mistakes though:
- The inspiration behind SELinux seems sound, but the design is a big break from Unix tradition. The system should be shaped more like ACL implementations in other Unices and other software (compare HP/UX, Solaris, and how ACLs work in AFS (except change to files)). I usually disable SELinux for this reason.
- Preferences in GNOME should be stored in a relational database, not in the ancient DB* formats
- Abandoning /mnt to prefer /media for automounting was a bad idea
- Their AMD64 distro is a disaster for people who ever compile things. "lib" should be always be for native libraries.
- Including Mono is a bad move that hurts software freedom
- Their package dependency trees are too conservative