Why people are not switching to Fedora

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann at redhat.com> wrote:
> Josh Boyer píše v Po 11. 05. 2015 v 09:32 -0400:
>> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann at redhat.com
>> > wrote:
>> > Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400:
>> > Optimus support
>> > > Quite a few people did bring up that our Optimus support wasn't
>> > > great. Luckily I know Bastien Nocera is working on
>> > > something there based on work by Dave Arlie, so hopefully this is
>> > > one we can check off soon.
>> >
>> > I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were
>> > mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also
>> > asked
>> > them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for
>> > multiple
>> > graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has
>> > really solved this problem.
>> >
>> > And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having
>> > multimedia
>> > support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of
>> > running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you
>> > don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new
>> > release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably
>> > solved by a couple of commands.
>> >
>> > So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because
>> > they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's
>> > focus
>> > on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room
>> > for improvement.
>>
>> I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the
>> "technical issues", but it seems to be implied.  While that might be
>> the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do
>> about it breaking from a technical perspective.  It's proprietary, so
>> we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to
>> ship
>> and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
>
> Well, unlike free implementations of popular codecs, free
> implementation of nVidia drivers can be and is legally re
> -distributable by us, so although it's hard to make it happen with our
> limited resources and nVidia doesn't cooperate at all, it has a
> solution legally, so it still IMHO falls under technical issues.

Yes, but...

> But to the point: I know the reasons why Fedora doesn't work with
> nVidia drivers. I was just stating the biggest issue I hear from users
> they have with Fedora. By far more crucial than missing multimedia
> support. Not only because multimedia codecs are solvable by a few
> commands once for all, but also because Windows users who are still
> the biggest group out there don't really expect an OS with a complete
> multimedia support, they're used to going out and getting VLC or some
> magic-multimedia-codecs-pack.exe.
>
> I introduced Fedora to 600 IT students (mostly Windows users) last
> year from whom a larger number installed it. I don't remember having a
> single complain about missing codecs, but we spent a lot of time with
> dozens of them because of problems with graphics drivers (mostly
> nVidia, some AMD, no problems with Intel) and in some cases with all
> our experience we just had to give up and tell them to install Fedora
>  in a virtual machine in Windows to work on their school projects.

I'm aware of all this too.  What isn't new is that there is no actual
suggestion for improvement, mostly because it's a situation that
doesn't have any area for improvement outside of "make the FOSS driver
better".  So I'm agreeing with you that it's a problem, but we knew
that already.

Believe me, I know it is terrible to have to tell people there is no
solution for a problem.  However, unless someone comes up with an idea
that doesn't undermine Fedora's values or cause an inordinate amount
of work for maintainers, I'm afraid we're kind of stuck with it.

josh