Summary of Reddit thread

[Chris Murphy]

Christian Schaller cschalle at redhat.com  Thu Apr 2 14:19:55 UTC 2015
> I think a lot of these items are things we are already aware of and trying to fix, but of course not all of them are easily fixable, like access to proprietary Windows or MacOS X applications or similar hotkeys/behaviour across UI toolkits. I think we made some great strides in the stability department, but reading the reddit thread did reinforce that it is an area we need to keep focus going forward.
>

Stability and polish seems challenging with two releases per year,
each one with only 13 months of security updates. Conversely on OS X
it's one year with software updates, 2-3 years of security updates,
and yet new application versions work on at least 2 major OS X
versions if not 3 or 4.

Fedora churn emphases newness over stability and polish as features.

Another is whether a Linux distro, including Fedora, is an OS or just
a collection of packages? I see more emphasis on components, rather
than how it fits into a whole. Apple has its walled garden in the form
of proprietary software, but FOSS puts upstreams into walled gardens
of their own, essentially immunized from feature requests let alone
anything approaching insistence.

In a recent installer password quality thread on the security@ list,
mitr writes "All of this just takes a willingness to look at a dozen
components at a time instead of at a single one, and a willingness to
write patches that sum up to thousand lines instead of a single
five-line patch."
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/security/2015-February/002079.html

And I'd extrapolate that to the entire OS.  Are there generalists with
the distro's vision, and political capital to inform and convince
upstreams in a cooperative manner? The component specialists really
don't seem to have this interest, outside of the desktop environments.

I think Fedora should not model itself after, or chase the IDE
mentality of Apple or Microsoft. In my view, it isn't really free
anyway, just because of a licensing difference. It's only made really
free by bridging the already large and widening gap between the
application developer and user. The opposite almost happened [1], but
those companies abandoned that path. So quite honestly, I'd say, screw
these other models of development, all you can hope for replicating
them with a different frosting but the substance will still amount to
the same thing and for that, why bother?


[1]
http://thetrendythings.com/read/20042


-- 
Chris Murphy