humble suggestion to Fedora developers

[Bill Oliver]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> [snip]
> Well, based on my short experiments with Unity and my failed attempts with 
> Gnome 3, I don't like both. Both are similar, both are based on the same 
> GUI-ideas. If I only had a choice between these 2, I'd choose Unity.
>
> Ralf
>

I think it's a function of complexity.  I can remember when there weren't all these manager and configuration tools and such, and installing linux on a new machine meant editing files, downloading drivers, etc.  When a new version/distro came out, it was a huge hassle, but most of the hassle didn't come from the distro.  It came from downloading and configuration by hand -- but it was expected, so it somehow didn't "count."

Now we have all these shiny distros with bells, whistles, flashing lights, and automatic configuration tools that do all this stuff for us in an entertaining manner.  We have reorganized things to make it easy for the configuration tools in a way that makes manual configuration harder and harder.

That's OK.  It's a good thing that linux is easier to install and use for people who do''t want to be system administrators.  But the cost is that every one of these features introduces a probability that it will not work with something else, and the likelihood that a new version or distro will have problems necessarily approaches 1.

And it will approach 1 for *any* such distro.  Changing distros doesn't help this problem, unless you go to one of the minimal distros that are still oriented towards simplified manual configuration (if there is such a one nowadays).  My personal philosophy is that I try to stick with one distro and learn how to manually modify things to bypass the configuration tools as much as possible -- though some such tools, such as NetworkManager seem to do their best to fight against those efforts.

billo