Why people are not switching to Fedora
Christian Schaller
cschalle at redhat.com
Thu May 7 18:34:20 UTC 2015
Hi, so a couple of weeks ago I blogged** about who Fedora Workstation is an integrated system, but also asking for
feedback for why people are not migrating to Fedora Workstation, especially asking about why people would be using
GNOME 3 on another distro. So I got about 140 comments on that post so I thought I should write up a summary and
post here. There was of course a lot of things mentioned, but I will try to keep this summary to what I picked up
as the recurring topics.
So while this of course is a poll consisting of self selected commentators I still think the sample is big enough that we
should take the feedback into serious consideration for our plans going forward. Some of them I even think are already
handled by underway efforts.
Release cadence
Quite a few people mentioned this, ranging from those who wanted to switch us to a rolling release, a tick/tock
release style, to just long release cycles. Probably more people saying they thought the current 6 Month cycle
was just to harrowing than people who wanted rolling releases or tick/tock releases.
3rd Party Software
This was the single most brought up item. With people saying that they stayed on other distros due to the pain of
getting 3rd party software on Fedora. This ranged from drivers (NVidia, Wi-Fi), to media codecs to end user
applications. Width of software available in general was also brought up quite a few times. If anyone is in any doubt
that our current policy here is costing us users I think these comments clearly demonstrates otherwise.
Optimus support
Quite a few people did bring up that our Optimus support wasn't great. Luckily I know Bastien Nocera is working on
something there based on work by Dave Arlie, so hopefully this is one we can check off soon.
Upgrades
Many people also pointed out that we had no UI for upgrading Fedora.
HiDPI issues
A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-
Multimonitor support
A few comments that our multimonitor support could be better
SELinux is a pain
A few comments about SELinux still getting in the way at times
Better Android integration
A few people asked for more/better Android device integration features
Built in backup solution
A few people requested we create some kind of integrated backup solution
Also a few concrete requests in terms of applications for Fedora:
http://www.mixxx.org
http://www.vocalproject.net
https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop/
http://peterlevi.com/variety/
http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org
choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)
** URL - https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2015/04/20/fedora-workstation-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/comment-page-1/#comments
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