Why people are not switching to Fedora

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Michael Catanzaro
<mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major
> version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release.
> Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.

There are a lot of lessons we've learned over the years working with a
team of 3 people across up to 4 (i.e. Branched state) releases.  One
of them is that freezing on a kernel version per release doesn't work
well.

But I think you've overstated the problem and and over-"simplified"
with the suggested solution.  The problem isn't that nVidia never
updates their driver.  They do.  And if we stuck with one kernel
version just because of them, we'd be sacrificing a number of other
users.

The problem is the lag time between when Fedora rebases and when
nVidia and the 3rd party repos update to match the new kernel version.
The most popular 3rd party repo already has a good understanding of
how and when Fedora rebases, but they need the newer kernel in place
in Fedora to build against once an updated driver is available.
Outside of building it within Fedora, I'm not sure there's much to be
done.  This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Fedora keeps 3
kernels installed, so nVidia users still have working options.  They
will get the update eventually.

josh