Why people are not switching to Fedora

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "drago01" <drago01 at gmail.com>
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 3:23:01 PM
> Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
> 
> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 4:48 PM, 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.
> 
> Can you recall the last time where we shipped a kernel before nvidia
> supported it?
> We don't really wait for them but they don't take that long to catch up ...
> 
> You are suggesting a solution for a problem that doesn't really exists
> much in practice.
> --
 
I am wondering if we are maybe making this issue harder to solve than it is. 
I haven't used the NVidia binary drivers in a few years, but back when I did
it wasn't that much of a pain. I used one of the 3rd party rpms with the driver
in it and while it was usually a little bit of time between a new Fedora kernel
and the NVidia driver getting rebuilt, it was never a real issue. I just kept
booting with the old kernel until the driver got updated. 

So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe
some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major
security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit? (maybe easier
said than done?). But the assumption that as soon as a new Fedora kernel is out you HAVE 
to start using it seems to be creating problems for ourselves that doesn't need to be the
case?

Christian