On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 01:24 +0100, M. Fioretti wrote: > On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 09:59:03 AM +1000, Res (res@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > > 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, > > "things to just work" and "bleeding edge by design" just cannot mix, > regardless of what one thinks of supporting proprietary codecs or not, > can they? > > The basics, the ones which should be tried and tested, should work, no? The instability should be as one moves toward the edge. These are not testing releases, bleeding edge or not. Yes, I expect some difficulties. No, I don't expect major things to break with each new release. > In this sense yes, Fedora is not, can not, and does not want to be the first > distribution for Windows refugees. Really? Back when RH moved to Fedora, it sure looked that way to me (been using since RH 6.1, by the way). What were the alternatives - Mandrake? Certainly Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, and such had reputations that would discourage a casual user/experimenter. Suse? Maybe - but I'm not going there now. My recollection, faulty though it may be, was that Red Hat and Fedora were billing themselves as reasonable deskop replacements. For *end* users. Ubuntu is looking better and better, because they *are* taking end-users into account. So what *does* Fedora want to be - the beta platform for RHEL? I don't mind helping out, I don't mind filing bugs, but that is not the reason why I use Linux on my machines. It's just not the purpose, and when my installation is seen in that light I get a touch annoyed. Mindshare is in the numbers of end-users; that's where the visibility lies. And most end-users, still, use Windows. Do the math. > > > Secondly, the version upgrade is messy > > This I cannot comment on. I've always installed each version from > scratch, because of all the horror upgrade stories I've been reading > (for any distro...) since the 90's... > > Marco And here I thought things were supposed to be getting better. Silly me. Like when the FC6 upgrade breaks the sound on my desktop. No discernable cause, as far as I can tell - just no sound. FC6 LiveCD gives me sound. Yes, I upgraded from FC5. Should I have reinstalled from scratch? Technically, perhaps. Practically that's a non-starter. It takes me far too long to bring everything back to a usable state (the initial upgrade, updating to newest fixed packages, installing everything I had before that was not in the upgrade, reconfiguring everything) that it isn't worth my while to do this every 6 months. Especially given the attitude I've seen toward people like me. In another message someone suggested reading the current RPM database before an reinstallation upgrade and making sure to install those packages. That would eliminate a goodly amount of time from my upgrade procedures, and a tremendous amount of pain. Ideally something would detect my configurations for those programs and save them out somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath. -Don
