Why people are not switching to Fedora

Sun May 10 23:02:23 UTC 2015

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

hi
I couldn't agree with this post more. It's the age old battle against
user convenience versus user awareness. You've got a certain segment
of the population that thinks computers are this amazing magical box.
You press the power button, windows, because everyone uses windows,
right? Comes on and it all just works. Then you've got the rest, who
generally like to figure out how things work. For us, I count myself
one of these, a problem isn't a problem, it's an opportunity to figure
out what's gone wrong so I can fix it. My patience isn't limitless,
and I do have my frustration points, but fedora is what it is. If you
want a distro taht puts all that nonfree goodness in there by default,
pick another distro. Harsh, but true. I for one, and I suspect many
others, aren't going to go out of the way to put mp3, aac, etc codecs
in fedora, just to satisfy the "just works" group of users. I'm not
even sure fedora could, but I've already mentioned this. What I think
they should do, and this can be brought up in one of the wg meetings
maybe, is to have a samples folder of "free" codecs, ogg music files,
maybe a few videos, some open document files, maybe assorted other
files, to show that you don't have to have proprietary file formats to
listen to music. Mp3 is just bits, with a particular header at the
beginning that identifies it as an mp3. The music is just raw audio
data. You can take that music out, transplant it into another
container and you wouldn't know the difference. And you don't have to
know the internals of gstreamer to get mp3 codecs working. It's like
this. The good codecs are not patent encumbered. The bad and ugly ones
might be, depending on a whole bunch of legal stuff that's way over my
head. You want those to play mp3, aac, etc. You go on rpmfusion and
get them. Simple. If a user cannot do that, stick to windows or ubuntu
or something.
Thanks
Kendell clark

Ankur Sinha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2015-05-07 at 23:27 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
>> I should also point out that this specific third party repo is
>> not a solution. It's not easy for people to install, it requires
>> prior knowledge. If a user needs to google search how to make
>> their music play and follow instructions on some forum, that's a
>> very bad first impression. If you google how to play mp3 in
>> fedora, the first result is an askfedora thread, whose first
>> answer talks about gstreamer1 porting... that's not useful for
>> users. At all. So not only it's a google search, it's a google
>> search that would land you on pages with confusing technical
>> terms. Yes, Workstation is for developers, but you can't expect
>> every web developer to get familiar with the architecture of our
>> multimedia stack just to play their music.
> 
> I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating 
> people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people 
> repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge
> deal breaker.
> 
> While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the other
> is also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a
> free of charge system..
> 
> I do understand that having multimedia support is important user
> wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate
> people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to
> install software that is not FOSS.
> 
>> And even if they do find that repo, they have no way to install
>> it securely and safely. While rpmfusion packages are signed, the
>> key is downloaded in the initial setup (when you download the
>> -release RPM) over plain text, and the page you download it from
>> is a wiki people can just edit - and also served over plain text
>> so someone could modify the instructions and the links...
>> 
>> Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough
>> with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and
>> doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes
>> takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
> 
> So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't 
> that be a good way to go to help our users?
> 
>> 
>> I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a
>> complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know
>> is: 1) People should be able to play music and videos 2) People
>> shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and 
>> videos 3) People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about
>> how their OS works to perform these basic tasks.
> 
> 4) People should know what FOSS is about. 5) People should know
> what intellectual property rights are.
> 
> I want to reiterate - it's not just the legal liabilities that
> such software bring to RH, it's also about the philosophy that FOSS
> is based on.
> 
>> 
>> And this example is about codecs... drivers are even a bigger
>> mess. How is a user supposed to download a wifi driver when their
>> wifi is not working? Keep in mind that many newer laptops don't
>> have an ehternet port at all. If you have a broadcom wireless
>> chip and no ethernet port, you'll need a second device, or a
>> second OS, to find out how to get the driver and how to install
>> it. And if you have a different OS that already works, and Fedora
>> requires you to either replace your wifi chip or figure out the
>> magic command lines to install a driver, why would you make the
>> switch?
> 
> Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that 
> have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in
> the kernel has become much much better recently) know better than
> to buy broadcom in the future.
> 
> 
>> Basically, the more time a person needs to spend on learning how
>> to make your OS work the less they'd want to make the switch.
> 
> It isn't "making your OS work", it's "installing additional 
> components" - again, if they knew why it had to be done, I'm sure
> they wouldn't mind doing it once every 13 months (and less if they
> use fedup which has worked like a charm on my three machines this
> week :D)
> 
> I'm completely on board with any movement that aims to educate
> people on these issues - I'm not on board with any movement about
> changing our foundations/policies regarding.
> 
> 
> 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2
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=Swvy
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----