Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Thu Apr 19 18:36:05 UTC 2007


Dotan Cohen wrote:
> User friendliness is the least friendly of several measurements. As
> Fedora now stands, the limiting agent in Fedora user friendliness is
> the (lack of) multimedia support. It's not a coincidence that that is
> the title of this thread.

The original subject was not about proprietary codecs at all.

  It's
> the implementation that I disagree with, not the policy.

Policy determines implementation. We won't include proprietary software 
and if that affects usability we can't solve the problem in all 
instances. This is the constraint that we work with and we have made it 
very explicit.

> Not the need, but the purpose and implementation. If it's implemented
> as FC7 test1 (the latest I have been priveleged to play with, please
> excuse me if the point is not valid for test3) then it is a bad
> implementation and should be addressed. It's more critical in a LiveCD
> than the install distro as the LiveCD is more accessible to
> (potential) new users.

Test 1 is very much outdated and you should know better than using it as 
a starting point of discussion. Hopefully you have filed bugs for 
whatever problems you came across rather than just calling it bad.  Use 
a more recent revisions and if you want to discuss problems with it sign 
up in fedora-test list and continue there. This is the wrong forum for 
that.

> We can not deter them by identifying the most popular usage
> [work|play]-flows and making them possible with no
> googling/asking/prior knowledge/searching. Only click-click-click.
> It's possible, as [k]Ubuntu has proven. It's even possible given the
> legal requirements imposed on Redhat. It just needs to be done

It's not always possible. Ubuntu is already include proprietary kernel 
drivers by default and plans to do more in future versions. This is not 
something we are ever going to do in Fedora. If that leaves usability 
gaps end users will have to live with that in some instances.

This discussion has turned no useful points at all and I am stopping at 
this stage. If you have anything useful to say further please contact me 
offlist and don't reply here. Thanks.

Rahul




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