<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Arthur Pemberton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pemboa@gmail.com">pemboa@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
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</div>A newbie would likely either stick with the OSS drivers, (assuming<br>
they get at least 1024x768) or they would Google it, or they would<br>
give up.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>That last option is to me what's inexcusable. We (and by "we" I mean the community) shouldn't be marketing things to newbies so that they attempt to install it, spend a week trying to get something working, then give up and install windows again, with a permanent bad taste in their mouth regarding linux. Say what you want about Gentoo - at least it makes no pretenses. <br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
Also, I personally think that Fedora should have an explicit warning<br>
against use by computer newbies (ie. people not interested in fiddling<br>
with their install at all) -- this is a separate topic, but I fee that<br>
Fedora's FOSS idealism (which I like) currently stands in the way of<br>
ease of use due to he behavior of most hardware manufactures.<br></blockquote><div><br>But then we have stuff like NetworkManager, which seems to be in place solely to make Fedora easier to use by newbies - and in the process screwing people who actually *do* know what they're doing and just having stuff like that get in the way.<br>
<br>Why is it so difficult to turn pulseaudio off? Why did NetworkManager keep restarting itself after I shut it down - even to the point of *shutting off the services*? Why was SElinux introduced in such a halfassed way that my default behavior on any new fedora install was to shut it off? Why was KDE 4 introduced when it was not ready for primetime? (I really dislike it, I would have rather stuck with 3.5 and had 4.0 as an option - it wouldn't have been all that much more difficult to do a side by side and a way to select between them. And I was a KDE developer!)<br>
<br>It seems like I'm being hard on you guys. OK, I am. But it's just because I see what Fedora was and could still be, and instead I'm sitting here fighting with it because it's done in such an unpolished and schizophrenic manner.<br>
<br>--Russell<br></div></div></div>