Summary of Reddit thread

[Michael Catanzaro]

I see three weaknesses for us that we must address:

* Marketing: we're seriously underrated compared to other distros,
considering the quality of what we release relative to what other
distros are releasing. With very important exceptions:
* There's no reasonable way to upgrade from one Fedora release to the
next.
* Post release updates are crazy.

And one weakness we can't really address:

* Legal issues (multimedia)

(Although we should make an effort to get MP3 support in F23, since the
last problematic patent we know about expires in September.)

On Thu, 2015-04-02 at 21:29 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> Christian Schaller cschalle at redhat.com  Thu Apr 2 14:19:55 UTC 2015
> > I think a lot of these items are things we are already aware of and trying to fix, but of course not all of them are easily fixable, like access to proprietary Windows or MacOS X applications or similar hotkeys/behaviour across UI toolkits. I think we made some great strides in the stability department, but reading the reddit thread did reinforce that it is an area we need to keep focus going forward.

FWIW I think we've already fixed most of those complaints long ago.
Anything related to digging in /etc to muck with settings is only true
for power users; you don't have to do that on Workstation, unless you're
trying to tweak something that you probably do not need to tweak, and
would not be able to tweak at all on a Mac. That you have the *option*
to dig into text files and use the terminal does not mean you *must* do
so. (We need a slogan for that.)

The multimonitor complaints related to Xfce, I think.

In general, we need to differentiate ourselves better from other Linux
distributions, because we're being dragged down by people's impressions
of other distros, or their impressions of what Fedora was like 10 years
ago. "Fedora is a test bed for RHEL" and "Fedora is too hard for new
users" are the particularly damaging thoughts, which we must replace
with "Workstation just works" or something like that.

> Stability and polish seems challenging with two releases per year,
> each one with only 13 months of security updates. Conversely on OS X
> it's one year with software updates, 2-3 years of security updates,
> and yet new application versions work on at least 2 major OS X
> versions if not 3 or 4.

I think we're better off targeting the new Windows model, where upgrades
get pushed semi-regularly as part of the normal updates process. If the
upgrade is graphical and safe, we should be fine. The current issue is
that there's no way for a normal human being to know when his release is
outdated or unsupported, let alone upgrade from one to the next. We need
to show a notification with GNOME Software and handle the upgrade there.
We have mockups for this already:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/software/version2/wire-os-upgrades.png

I'm satisfied with the quality/stability of Fedora that we release. Our
QA for releases is significantly better than for any other distro with a
comparable release cycle, including Ubuntu (their "installer wipes my
entire disk without asking" bug -- did they ever fix that? -- would have
been a blocker for us).

I am *not* satisfied with the quality/stability of Fedora once you press
the Install Updates button. That is our biggest problem. I want to adopt
something closer to Ubuntu's SRU policy (although not as strict as that)
for Workstation, where package maintainers do not get to approve their
own updates. Most importantly, package maintainers should be required to
*justify* updates, and also prepare the changelogs properly using
PackageKit markdown, before they get approved for Workstation.

We would use this process not just to sanity check the updates we
release, but more importantly to reduce the frequency of updates. I'm
less comfortable saying "no you can't fix bugs in your package" than I
am saying "no you can't fix bugs in your package every week, wait a bit
longer." It's not really reasonable to update most packages more than
once per month, IMO.

I'm also interested in pushing non-security all together once per month.

> Fedora churn emphases newness over stability and polish as features.
> 
> Another is whether a Linux distro, including Fedora, is an OS or just
> a collection of packages? I see more emphasis on components, rather
> than how it fits into a whole. Apple has its walled garden in the form
> of proprietary software, but FOSS puts upstreams into walled gardens
> of their own, essentially immunized from feature requests let alone
> anything approaching insistence.

Well, I think it's both: some packages are part of the core OS, and
others aren't. Terminal, Files, and gdm are part of the OS. Eclipse is
not.