Why people are not switching to Fedora

Thu May 7 19:42:48 UTC 2015

Hi Alex,
Thanks for this. Yeah, I am sure that better Windows/MS interoperability is important
for a lot of people and it is something we should look into. I know there was a special
AD/Windows interoperability effort that happened around the run up to RHEL7, so we can
hopefully build on that. Also Rishi do have some windows work on his todo list for
GOA, and while the aim for that was specifically to make remoting individual windows
applications over RDP easier, I am sure a lot of the work would be generally useful for
better AD support for instance.

Christian

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alex G.S." <alxgrtnstrngl at gmail.com>
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 3:31:35 PM
> Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
> 
> Christian,
> 
> Can I add one more item that list? It's not so much why people aren't
> switching from another Linux distro to Fedora but a more general theme
> involving MacBooks. In my experience with a recent migration to Office 365
> from Google Apps at my workplace I can tell you that is the weak spot for
> Workstation. Most often the choice to use a MacBook is one out of necessity
> to access Microsoft collaboration tools. Like I said previously, and this is
> the third time I mention this:
> 
> Current pain points with Office 365 integration are:
> 
> 
> 
> 1. Users should be able to do a one-step setup of Office 365 using GNOME
> Online Accounts and not have to configure Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy
> separately, this is too complicated for most users.
> 
> 
> 
> 2. Empathy currently doesn't support enough features from Lync (now Skype for
> Business) - the Microsoft enterprise communication tool - and that's a show
> stopper. You can't do video calls, you can't initiate meetings and you can't
> do screen-sharing or file-transfers.
> 
> According to my understanding an encryption library is missing in
> Pidgin/Empathy that would allow the Windows/Mac clients to video/audio talk
> to Linux clients over a mandated encrypted connection. Currently the brand
> new Skype for Business Windows client can have Audio calls with Linux
> clients and do file transfers but it's very unreliable.
> 
> 
> 3. OneDrive isn't supported by documents and there's no way to sync documents
> or access documents directly from Nautilus. Seamless OneDrive support plus
> LibreOffice would be an awesome combination.
> 
> 
> 4. Evolution is missing some crucial Office features such as finding
> available meeting rooms and setting up Lync meetings. Also calendar sharing
> is a bit broken. People have shared calendars with me and I still couldn't
> access them.
> 
> 
> 5. OneNote [2] is the note-taking app in Office. Currently no known Linux app
> can edit these documents. It would be great to have an equivalent GNOME app
> that could import things like OneNote documents and then sync them to
> OneDrive.
> 
> Ideally Fedora Workstation should support Microsoft servicies and Office 365
> out of the box enabling IT departments to add it to their "approved desktop
> OS" lists and start rolling them out to their various teams in large
> numbers. Another issue is how Workstation integrates with Active Directory.
> It would be amazing if I could log into Workstation using my AD credentials
> and then have my machine register itself with the AD server. This would be a
> game changer.
> 
> This would make it way too easy for IT to justify using it's existing Windows
> machines and deploying them users as Fedora Workstations instead of Mac OS
> X. There is also major synergy for enterprises that are already using CentOS
> or RHEL on their servers. This would be a win-win for everyone, including
> the IT departments.
> 
> If given the opportunity I would love to join a WG meeting and talk about
> these issues as someone who uses Fedora Workstation at work in a Microsoft
> environment.
> 
> Thank you for your patience and hard work.
> 
> Best,
> 
> AlexGS
> 
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:04 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky < znmeb at znmeb.net >
> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller < cschalle at redhat.com >
> wrote:
> > Hi, so a couple of weeks ago I blogged** about who Fedora Workstation is an
> > integrated system, but also asking for
> > feedback for why people are not migrating to Fedora Workstation, especially
> > asking about why people would be using
> > GNOME 3 on another distro. So I got about 140 comments on that post so I
> > thought I should write up a summary and
> > post here. There was of course a lot of things mentioned, but I will try to
> > keep this summary to what I picked up
> > as the recurring topics.
> > 
> > So while this of course is a poll consisting of self selected commentators
> > I still think the sample is big enough that we
> > should take the feedback into serious consideration for our plans going
> > forward. Some of them I even think are already
> > handled by underway efforts.
> 
> If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora
> Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated
> to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:
> 
> 1. They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and
> still had problems meeting deadlines, and
> 2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.
> 
> So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling
> release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or,
> for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if
> someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or
> Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply
> say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to
> spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do
> things."
> 
> They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they
> all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged
> software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on
> trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not
> really "better" than they are.
> 
> So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling*
> advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something
> meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't.
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