Developer focus for Fedora workstation

[Christian Schaller]

While we can make our Mac hardware story better, we need to keep in mind that
Apple is a pretty hostile company here in terms of running alternative operating
systems. There is absolutely no information from them on their hardware, so we are
often left with having to reverse engineer to fix bugs, which is slow and time consuming.

My goal here instead is for us to work with more friendly hardware makers to ensure that
their hardware work well, so that we can provide Fedora users with a recommendation,
i.e. if you want things to work perfectly out of the box get a laptop from vendor X of
series Y.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to work as well as we can with as much hardware as possible,
but realistically we are not in a position to guarantee more than a select set of series. 

Christian



----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chris Murphy" <lists at colorremedies.com>
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 7:26:11 PM
> Subject: Re: Developer focus for Fedora workstation
> 
> 
> On Aug 15, 2014, at 8:18 AM, Andreas Nilsson <lists at andreasn.se> wrote:
> 
> > On 08/15/2014 05:37 AM, Adam Batkin wrote:
> >> 
> >> What do people think? I'm trying to be constructive here. Do other people
> >> agree or disagree with these ideas? I do have some thoughts on how to
> >> actually fix some of these things which might be suited to fresh threads,
> >> if I'm not barking up the wrong tree...
> > 
> > I think thinking bigger than the above polish items would serve us greatly.
> > I have tons of things that annoy me as well [as a web developer], but
> > there must be bigger fish to fry out there.
> 
> It's a good point.
> 
> > What would it take for your friends who are developers to move over from a
> > non-free Operating System to Fedora, apart from window management
> > behaviour?
> 
> I wonder if that question is a trap because it really isn't all that much
> about the desktop behavior. I use Macs, and there are several show stopper
> bugs that come well before GNOME or KDE or xfce: overheating and MCE errors,
> possibly one dead Mac as a result of this; wireless doesn't work out of the
> box, is a PITA to figure out how to get it to work; trackpad behavior is too
> erratic to tolerate more than a couple hours worth; I've never had success
> getting bluetooth to work, thus no alternatives to the trackpad.
> 
> Any non-free OS user coming over to Fedora would have their own list of show
> stoppers before the desktop even comes up. Probably top on the list is video
> drivers.
> 
> How do I get dev friends to move to Fedora when I can't even do that? I'm
> increasingly likely to give up using Macs to run Fedora, and get hardware
> that will work instead. My dev friends won't do that. OS X doesn't lend
> itself all that well to virtualizing other OS's: all the VM's are memory/CPU
> pigs, and only VirtualBox is FOSS.
> 
> So I think the question is a trap because it emphasizes conversion, rather
> than growing the market for FOSS, and Fedora in particular. What happens if
> any or all of the following were to happen?
> 
> - Make VirtualBox suck less on OS X and Windows, because it seems like a lot
> more work getting linux, Fedora in particular, to run; at least on Macs.
> 
> - Fedora Workstation runs in a container on Fedora Server, and any OS X,
> Windows, Chromebook client uses Fedora Workstation via Guacamole.
> 
> - Making it possible and easy to install a Fedora development environment on
> OS X (via Macports) and/or Windows. Make the Fedora development environment
> a portable infiltrating product.
> 
> 
> 
> Chris Murphy
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