Re: Rolling release model philosophy
On 11/02/2012 04:53 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com> writes:
> On Fri, 2012-11-02 at 21:07 +0100, drago01 wrote:
>> I disagree with that. Fedora releases had some small regression
>> introduced via updates from time but is is *very* usable as a stable
>> operating system.
> I disagree. It's usable by the kind of people who use Fedora.
Uh, no. What you describe is usable by the kind of people who use
rawhide. Which is what, 1% of our user base? If that.
Abandoning any pretense of having stable releases will eliminate a huge
fraction of the user community. For sure it will eliminate *me*. I'm
not in the business of fighting OS bugs every single day, and I will not
be forced into that business. I have other things that I'm more
productive at.
+1. One of the major reasons I came to Fedora (after a long tour that
took me through Slackware, Gentoo, Debian Testing, Ubuntu, with brief
stints elsewhere) is that it has releases. Real releases, with most
major changes happening with the new release.
I ran Debian Testing for several years, and encountered a problem. I was
spending too time paying attention to changes and new software
developments, and when they might hit my system, at the expense of
getting work done.
It's purely selfish, my psychology, etc., but I personally basically
need a release, so I can batch up all my "ooh, what's this shiny new
thing?" tendencies in a few days twice a year, rather than an hour here
and an hour there.
Having used Fedora now since F15, I've personally found the releases to
be quite reliable and usable, with just enough software updating over
their lifecycle to keep my laptop rather comfortable. And better than my
brief previous Fedora experience back around F9, when every other kernel
update broke my wireless card[1].
Best,
- Michael
1. Literally. Whether or not my wireless networking worked toggled with
each kernel update with remarkable consistency. I'm glad things are
better now.