Occasionally there are long threads in the Fedora forums which start with flame baiting by one or other poster and quite often run for ages without reaching a sensible conclusion but generate bad feeling and not much else. As a long standing fedora user and tester (since FC1) I have to say that I have had the pleasure of being able to run an operating system at no cost on not only my own machines, but also those of relatives, and at work, which in general run both more securely as well as more efficiently than the alternative (at cost) operating systems. Sure there have been occasions when one or other package has failed to work as expected, and on occasion one or other machine has had some serious problems with graphics, but overall machines have run without issue over generations of Fedora releases, and other colleagues and friends who are hooked on proprietary OSes have expressed their admiration for how much more efficient workflow seems possible on my machines than their own. What kind of response do you get when running XP if you come across a problem - where do you go to get a bug fixed within a matter of days or perhaps even a few weeks when running XP or Vista? Is it even possible to get fast turn around and a response direct from a developer or packager (if the latter exists for those OSes)? Here we have forums where problems can be openly discussed and more often than not are fixed within a reasonable time frame (and with the vast army of people using Fedora in many and novel ways there will certainly be bugs found!). We have Bugzilla where responses are (mostly) open and interactive - sure some bugs are harder to fix than others - but in general the system does work - and we have many hundreds of excellent packages available to install almost instantaneously - no need to go and get a CD every time a new printer is added to the system (mostly!) - no need to run CD when you buy a new camera to install specialist picture processing software - no need to run a CD to install graphics drivers - they are all just part of the system. Yes we do need to spend a little time looking up what to do with a new package, or to work around some problem or other - and occasionally quite a bit of time - but the hints and tips are public and shared around everyone. I recently installed F13 on an old laptop - and updated it this afternoon - in general it works very well indeed and we are still only just at the freeze stage with some bugs to be worked through before release -but hey, it works, and I could probably almost use it for production already even though it is in a pre-release phase. Could this be said of proprietary OSes at a similar stage of development? I think all of us who use Fedora need to be aware of the fantastic service that so many people provide, often voluntarily, to package code, and develop code, and then fix code that we all download at no cost but our time. I for one am extremely grateful for the existence of Fedora and despite past issues with KDE major changes, Intel and Nvidia and ATI graphics support, major upgrades to Gnome and Openoffice, as well as to other packages, I am very pleased to have the privilege of running Fedora on all of my machines. Yes I still have a need for a few of them to dual boot XP - For example I can only update my satnav/GPS unit via proprietary packages in Windows, and often syncing/backup of mobile phone data (cellphones) can only be done in Windows - but progress is being made. I recently received a .docx encrypted file that could not be opened under Fedora - but even that problem will be resolved with F13 as Openoffice 3.2 supports encrypted .docx files. I hope that the long whingeing threads do not make those who contribute so positively to the Fedora project feel negative - but remember the silent majority who are very happy with its progress. So all in all I am happy to thank all the fine people who make Fedora what it is - and hopefully it will continue to be both cutting edge and highly usable through F14 and beyond. Happy Easter -- mike c -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
