On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 09:56:29AM +0100, Stephan Matthiesen wrote: > I just mention this because mailing lists tend to give a very selective, > biased picture. Lots of people with lots of problems, but all the millions of > users who are happy have no reason to post to the list, so they are > invisible. So I think when you are planning an upgrade, it would be good to > look at the complete picture, and this seems to me that the likelihood of > something seriously going wrong is very small. So true. And some others, including myself, have run into problems that could be solved to read the FAQ and search the list archives, and maybe ask a couple of questions. So far I have installed FC2 on 12 machines and helped a couple of friends and collegues to install it on their machines. My statistics so far: - 9x hit by the Windows dual boot issue, but easily solvable without loss of data, thanks to the info on this list (it's not entirely fair, those 9 systems are identical configurations, so this is actually just one data point in the bug statistics) - 1 machine failed to boot. Asus-board issue, solved by downloading the updated boot.iso Everything else just worked. So yes, it is somewhat more problematic than FC1 (but in many respects still better than some previous RHL versions). Bugs are to be expected in any OS. And bugs are getting fixed, usually at a reasonable pace. Now, what can we do to make Fedora Core even better for users? 1. A real community Let's hope the point will soon be reached where there is the public CVS repository, the ability for members of the community to become maintainers of packages, the 'real" Fedora Extras and Fedora Alternatives repositories etc. That would be a great step forward (but apparently somewhat difficult from redHat's end) 2. Documentation and information, and letting the users know about it. It would be great if the release notes or the Fedora website would mention the unofficial resources available to the users, like fedoranews.org, fedora forum, the unofficial Fedora FAQ, additional software repositories etc. Not everyone likes mailinglists, but it seems the only way to find out about e.g. fedoranews is to read on the website or release notes about the mailinglist, then subscribe or search the archive and wade through the enourmous amount of mail (which is a great reasource, but it is a lot to search through!) and then finally find out such a site exists. 3. A policy about updates. Why isn't the updated boot.iso for the ASUS boards available from the official locations? That would make it easier to find, and available on the mirrors. Seems to me like a much better solution than downloading it from ArjanV's personal site. An announcement of such an update would also be useful, on fedora-announce, and on the Fedora website. That would probably have saved us a lot of questions on the list. I fear the same will happen if an universal solution to the dual-boot problems will be found, since this will probably require an update of the anaconda installer or disk druid, so that's probably an updated boot disk. Will we have to create one ourselves or wait for FC3, or will such an update be officially published? Bugs in the installer will happen again, just like bugs in any piece of software. So a mechanism to fix them is necessary. It used to be possible to just wait for a fix in the next release, but with the shorter lifetime of the FC versions, this is not always an option any more. I would find it somewhat acceptable if the Fedora project had an official policy not to release installer updates but only package updates. I wouldn't like such a policy, but at least then the situation would be clear. Note: most of this was not relevant to me, I have used RedHat since 3.x and I knew about fedora.us int he RedHat 8 or 9 days, and I started using FC 1 at test 2 last autumn. But I'm thinking here from the perspective of a new user, who may or may not know about Linux already, and who may or may not be aware in advance of the goals of the fedora project. David Jansen
