Les Mikesell wrote:
Tony Molloy wrote:
Security updates are still being provided to XP so existing users aren't
being forced to switch yet as they are continuously in fedora, and
there's a chance they will have it mostly fixed by SP2 time. In any
case I can deal with a change once a decade or so. But yes, I will
complain if any of my current programs don't continue to run or else
have push-button updates to fix them.
You try to buy a PC from Dell recently with XP installed.
I don't object so much to installing a new system on a new machine
because I normally keep my old ones running to cover anything that won't
work immediately. Once everything is running correctly though, there is
no excuse for breaking it and it should not be necessary to reinstall an
operating system for the life of the hardware.
Bottom line is Fedora does make it easy to use 3rd party software.
The RPM system is open and well documented, any vendor that wants to can
create RPM packages. Some have. Any vendor that wants to can create a
YUM repository for automated updates. Some have.
If vmware/nvidia/whoever wants to have good compatibility with Fedora,
the ball is in their court - it is easy for them to do so.
Adobe already runs a repo for the flash plugin, I hope they add Acrobat
Reader to it. I don't care for nVidia's installer but rpm.livna.org
provides a safe packaging for their drivers.
btw - speaking of nvidia - I have a src.rpm right now that fails to
build in mock in x86_64 CentOS and Fedora 8 if (and only if) the nVidia
driver is loaded. Without the driver loaded, it builds just fine. It
builds in x86 the nvidia driver if I scale the cpu speed down but not at
full speed. About ~150 other src.rpm's did not exhibit that issue, but
this one does consistently.
The driver is thus broken (causes other programs to fail). RHEL/Fedora
do ship some drivers that are broken, very rarely are there zaro bugs in
software. But when open source and discovered, they can be patched. How
would Fedora patch the closed source nVidia driver? They can't. If they
shipped it, they would be shipping something they can't fix.
