>>> ESR has always been a lot of hot air. He's an attention whore. >>> >> >> He is some thing of a gas bag, isn't he. :D >> > > Maybe :), but he has a couple things I agree with, RH/Fedora is losing > ground on desktop share, because people want things to just work, like as > simple as playing a bloody mp3, which they can do with every other distro > out there. like it or not, its here and here to stay. I'm not certain that there's much Fedora can do about that. AFAIK, legal MP3 playback requires a license. For a community supported distro, I'm not sure if this is feasible and even if it were, it may disagree with some of the fundamental tenets of Free software. To his point about compromising ideals for end-user convenience, I'm in disagreement. > Try converting winblows users to Fedora, but saying, oh but you cant play > mp3's out of the box...you can, but youll have to go toa unofficial > RH/Fedora repo and try install it, or do like I do and erase the players > RH bastardises, and grab the source and install it, now say that to a > newbie and you've lost em! First impression are ever lasting in this > game. Here too... MP3s are nice, but it's not something that is a show-stopper for me or anyone that I've helped with Linux. I.e., if MP3 playback is important enough then it's a relatively simple matter to install the software. A rough equivalent would be WinZIP. It doesn't ship with Windows, but is a quick install. Same for SSH clients, editors, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash/Shockwave, Quicktime, and a host of other proprietary codecs. > Secondly, the version upgrade is messy, I've never ever yet upgraded from > one version of RH or Fedora without conflicts, FC4 was a comple explosion, > I gave up and reinstalled previous and ignored FC4. > Yet I can do this with even slackware and have been able to for years, > with slapt-get I was able to upgrade without a drama a slackware 7 box > to a slackware 11.0!!, reboot and viola! all working. True, I'll agree here. I haven't upgraded FC or RH in a long time as I generally do scratch installs. My boxes, once the distro is loaded, usually get heavily modified with all sorts of packages so it may be unrealistic in my case to have an upgrade work smoothly. My /home is separate so it's not too big a deal. > I'll possibly for time being stick with Fedora for desktops,as I've used > them since early RH, but no way in bloody hell will it ever run on any > server in my data center, I'll stick with slackware there, last RH server I > decommisioned about 2 years ago was RH9, it was unbreakable, Fedora > is by design "bleeding edge" or is that "bleeding edge of blunders", and > if we dont fix it soon, the likes of debian and suse will overtake us by a > long mile. I'd agree that FC on a server is not the best choice, though I run my own web/dns/file/ldap on FC5 or FC6 currently. Being a lazy admin though, FC fits me pretty well. You raise some good points and if you'd written the same thing that the gasbag had mailbombed the world with, I'd probably have read more attentively :P -- * The Digital Hermit http://www.digitalhermit.com * Unix and Linux Solutions kwan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
