Why people are not switching to Fedora

Eric Griffith egriffith92 at gmail.com
Sat May 9 01:14:46 UTC 2015


Hey all, I joined the -desktop mailing list literally because of this
thread and the associated blog post. I'm going to be responding from a
user's point of view.


>>Release Cadence:

Personally I think 6 months is about the appropriate time. If Fedora
moved to an 8-month release and didn't simultaneously make a
'Tumbleweed'-style branch then personally I'd just move to Arch
full-time.

Whether or not Fedora DOES switch to an 8 month, or even 12 month
release, I would personally love to see a Tumbleweed-style branch.
Something more stable than Rawhide but more to date than $RELEASE

>>3rd Party Software:

I don't like that getting mp3's, flash, etc, installed is such a pain
in the ass. I understand that its patent encumbered but -something-
needs to be done. Especially if RPMFusion is going through issues
right now. We all support FOSS and we all love FOSS, but lets be
honest here: if RPM-Fusion, or a replacement, didn't exist then
Fedora's share of the linux market would be a fraction of what it is.

>>Optimus Support:

I can't speak on this one since I don't have an Optimus enabled laptop.

>>Upgrades:

This was actually an idea I brought up to Richard Hughes a few years
ago, though it never went anywhere. See:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1036486

>>HiDPU Issues:

No HiDPI, can't comment.

>>Multimonitor Support:

I use KDE for the most part, kscreen is working fine here, so maybe
gnome specific? Or odd configuration?

>>Selinux Is A Pain:

I used to be in the enforcing=0 crowd by default. But I can happily
say that over the last 3 or so releases I haven't had to disable
selinux at all. And now when an alert does come up I actually read it
and pay attention.

>>Better Android Integration:

KDE Connect works perfectly fine for me under KDE, minus the fact i
wish it had a bluetooth backend (coming). I know Gnome has something
in the works.

>>Built In Backup Solution:

Something built in would be nice...


Side notes, things that fall under 'a thousand paper cuts' and the likes:

1) system-config-* utilities need some work... some of them are
broken, some of them are useless, some only work partially. Samba
comes to the mind especially, i tried using it a couple months ago and
it looked like it hadn't been updated at all since Fedora 10 or 11.

2) More improvements in things just as stand-alone utilities / work
with the KDE guys more:

I totally understand that Gnome is Fedora's focus, that's fine, but
the KDE spin is a pretty popular spin and has a lot of followers
within it. Maybe Fedora / Red Hat could spare a few developers to the
KDE side of things? Personally...I hate gnome shell. I try it every
release and I never like it more than I did before. BUT... It does
have some good ideas. System Settings and First Run being two of them.
Gnome has a lot of individually good utilities, hell my go-to disk
management is still Gnome Disks, but I feel like they are pretty
locked-in to the gnome desktop.


A couple specific things come to mind... Gnome has an Active Directory
integration module under Login... KDE doesn't. Gnome's got Rygel,
KDE's got nothing. The list goes on.

3) Add /usr/games to $PATH. I discovered this when installing some
games via GOG.com. Ubuntu has /usr/games in user $PATH by default and
GOG assumes thats there for their distro-independent installer
scripts. Reality is game developers are targeting Ubuntu and Fedora
needs to be matching Ubuntu's configuration where possible in order to
not needless raise the barrier-to-entry.

4) Thermald not packaged by default. I'm working on getting thermald
package and into mainline after Intel apparently stopped caring about
getting it in. Thermald is a very nice addition for any mobile systems
and its sad to see it not being used by distros.

5) Zram / zswap by default. Apple made a big deal about using RAM as
compressed swap for Yosemite or Mountain Lion. I'd be interested to
see some benchmarks for any performance / power efficiency gains.

6) Power efficiency... if Powertop has a tunable for it then I think
Fedora / Red Hat needs to lead the way in getting them enabled by
default in kernel / in udev. The difference between "all tunables
enabled" and "none enabled" on my laptop is about 5watts-- that's
several hours of battery life on my system.

7) Anaconda... I don't mean to start a flame war, and I don't want to
sound ungrateful (because new anaconda is better than the old) but I
really hate anaconda... Ubuntu ubiquity works because its in your
face: Here's step 1, here's step 2, here's step 3. Done. Go. From an
intuitive stand point the Hub-and-spoke model seems really...
non-intuitive.


8) Stop breaking packagekit / apper! I dunno if it was Fedora, the KDE
Team, Apper upstream or packagekit upstream but when Fedora first came
out Apper worked fine. Then I updated... Apper never prompted me for
available updates ever again and any attempts TO install packages
manually would lead to "an unhandled error occured." Tried clearing
the packagekit cache and everything. Don't know what happened, but
stuff like that CAN NOT happen. EVER. Standard user who is just
dipping their feet into Linux? They are going to have any idea where
to go for help, what to look for, or even that something's wrong. Even
if packagekit had some horrible privilege execution bug that had to
get fixed IF that fix would break a packagekit-frontend in the process
and it could not be automatically fixed, then that initial fix should
not be put out. Sure, you're fixing one security hole, but how many
more will remain open and unpatched because the user doesn't know
there's available updates?

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:29 PM, drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> hi
> >>> I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree
> >>> that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm
> >>> sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing
> >>> these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the
> >>> software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on
> >>> the bad end of an  riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
> >>
> >> Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents.
> >> And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way.
> >> If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally
> >> distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes
> >> so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either
> >> remove them or get a patent license.
> >> MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to
> >> handle most videos out there.
> >
> > And H.265, plus probably some of the Dobly ones for surround sound....
> > it's ongoing.
>
> I wrote "most" not "all" ;)
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