fedora vs. Debian?

[Jason White]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 07:52:43PM -0500, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> In terms of support, flexibility, is there really a difference?
> I understand both distributions are strong on their integrated packages. Both 
> support hardware speech, what I will be using.
> But is there anything else about one package over the other that should be 
> considered when weighing them?

The upgrade options are different. With Fedora, it used to be the case (and
still is?) that the only officially supported upgrade path from one release to
the next involves booting an installation CD and using the installer. The Yum
package maanger can in principle upgrade a running system, but so far as I
know this is not considered reliable for upgrades between Fedora releases.

In Debian, you can upgrade without having to reboot at all, which means that
you can use your speech or braille software during the upgrade without having
to obtain an installation CD that supports accessibility.

If you're considering Debian, Ubuntu would be worth examining as the Ubuntu
developers have been very supportive of accessibility-related work, including
the Gnome accessibility project, and not all of their changes have found their
way back into Debian yet. (Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian).