Re: The “Windows Just Works” BIG fallacy

[Chris Murphy]

re: codecs. So I had this experience the other day, mp4, and totem (Videos)
gives me some message about how some codec plugins are missing. dnf search
doesn't find them, adding RPM fusion and searching doesn't find them, I do
google searches and I run into the Internet Doesn't Work (TM), or more
specifically Google Search sucks because it doesn't present relevant
results in the first two pages. So I gave up and booted OS X.


re: document formats. I think it's a big pro to point out LibreOffice is
included and provides both Office document format support, and *easily*
enables the user to get out of that b.s. dependency. Closed document
formats really piss me off, much more than closed proprietary codecs. Yay
Document Liberation Project!


re: Windows vs Fedora installation. First there are two kinds of Windows
installations:
-- official media from Microsoft offers a very straightforward installer
that starts out with two options Upgrade and Custom. Neither suggests new
installation, so that's confusing but there are only two paths you pick on
and get it wrong and you pick the other option next time - not difficult.
It's also uncommon, because this method is designed mainly for upgrades,
not new installations.
-- OEM recovery partition. In Windows 8 the options are reset (obliterate
all data and reinstall the OS), and refresh (keep user data, but revert to
a clean unupdated OS and new settings). This is very similar to how mobile
devices reset. And similar to the systemd folks' idea of stateless systems.
And the direction I think installs and resets on Fedora ought to go in,
perhaps with a couple points of additional granularity.


OS X's installer is point and shoot, it offers essentially no options.
Apple and Microsoft don't spend squat on their installers. They're both
largely unchanged in over a decade. I've never run into a bug with either
of them. User confusion is minimized by the fact there are two or zero
options. They definitely never ever crash. Anaconda is just a pile of
feature sprawl and it's completely normal and understandable something that
complicated is going to have x% of presentable bugs and regressions - and
it does. Three years after newui, it still dominates blocker bugs. I
consider it a misallocation of resources, but lovely that life is, it's not
my decision or I'd rip out all of custom partitioning and marry it with
blivet-gui. [1]


re: graphics cards. This is terrible on Linux. It's not Fedora's fault.
Regressions, dual-GPU suckage, crap power management, on and on. It's just
awful, and I don't use Fedora when I'm on the road because of this - the
battery life is just unworkable. OS X has completely seamless integrated
and discrete graphics switching totally figured out, for years now. Of
course, they cheat, controlling drivers and hardware, and sign all the
super secret NDAs to have this functionality (because of course the world
would end fucking tomorrow if anyone knew the super secret shit).


[1]
My idea installation scenario for Fedora Workstation in another dimension,
is live media based on a Btrfs seed device, the user boots the media, and a
minimal UI helps them add a drive (partition) and configure some things,
including G-I-S starting, and then the system is usable. Behind the scenes,
the defined drive is added to the seed device, the seed device is removed,
all data on the live media is migrated to the user defined device and then
the live media is ejectable. No reboot required. Between ostree, or revised
offline updates atomically updating Btrfs snapshots, or Btrfs send/receive,
both the double boot of current offline updates as well as even any
compulsory reboot can be eliminated.

-- 
Chris Murphy
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