fedora remix stability

Where does Eben even mention the Fedora Remix in that article?  For all any of us know he may have been talking about Debian Squeeze - which ther design spark article you link to describes as 'rock solid stable'.

Sounds to me as though a rock solid stable OS is available - who cares if it's not the Fedora one?

He says the software team put a lot of effort into making it stable.

That indicates to me he's referring to fedora, because the debian

release is supposedly bog standard, without any such stability

enhancements from the software team.

It matters to people who intend to run the preferred distro for

whatever reasons.  There is also more chance of fedora

eventually getting built with hardware floating point support,

than there is for debian.

Well it indicated to ME that he might be talking about the software guys he knows and who provided the Debian reference release he's actually been using in practice for his demonstrations, rather than a release provided by a college in Canada which was only actually made available on the official site the day that BBC article came out, hence he's not actually been using Fedora Remix.  Particularly since that interpretation would then tally with reported reality as seen in that comparative review.  What are these 'whatever reasons' that will force people to run Fedora Remix rather than Debian?  If they run a slow unstable release instead of a useable stable release, wouldn't you say they picked the wrong one and have only themselves to blame?  Why would Fedora be the distro most likely to get hardfloat support?  I see from the forums someone's done a Gentoo hardfloat one.  If ArchLinux is currently the fastest of all ('by far', says DesignSpark), couldn't the producers of the other distros have a crack at figuring out why and replicating it?  SD cards are very cheap and trying a different release is very easy.  I see no reason for your unrelenting pessimism!

The fedora guys in Canada have been working on it since last fall, using an Alpha board,

so Eben has known about them for a long time.   I think debian is more solid than

running for weeks at a time without a reboot.

People may want to use the recommended distro because the Foundation has

said that support will not be offered for other distros.  They may expect the

recommended distro to be the most actively maintained and enhanced,

including security updates, optimizations, and hardware acceleration.

They may be worried that debian support may get dropped at some point,

like Ubuntu did.

Fedora may be more likely to get hardfloat support because there is actually

a Fedora/RPi team (at seneca), apparently under some sort of contract,

but no such Debian/RPi team or contract.