The Future of Fedora.

[Konstantin Riabitsev]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 17:51, Alexey Eremenko wrote:
> I am new to the Linux world, while I came from Windows XP world.

I'll do a blanket reply, which will hopefully clear some misconceptions
along the way.

Most effort that goes into Linux desktop these days is aimed not at
making Linux the best home user solution. Most companies working on
gnome and other desktop environments these days are interested in making
Linux desktop a viable solution in the corporate network environment --
like company workstations, point-of-sale systems, research desktops,
etc. Computers in such environments are installed and configured by
systems administrators who are paid to know how to configure a system
and what hardware does or does not work, and if it does not work, how to
make it work (if possible).

Your complaints are certainly valid from the point of view of a
home-user, but they are not likely to be fixed soon, primarily because
most of them are non-issues in the "corporate desktop" environment.
Companies dumping resources into Linux on the client, such as Sun,
Novell, Red Hat -- all realize that they are not likely to find rampant
adoption among home users, so they concentrate on markets where such
adoption is far more likely to take place, and that is in large
companies with lots of desktops. Many such companies are looking to cut
costs, and as Linux Desktop is currently looking more and more appealing
for office and research use, I expect that at some point the adoption
among companies will happen in droves.

So, you see, the developer time allocation is lopsided, with home-user
problems being shuffled off to the back-burner. This is not to say that
your complaints will be completely disregarded -- far from it, but there
is little chance of things getting to be the way you like in the near
future. There are companies who are working on creating an end-user
desktop, such as Lindows, for example, so you might want to check it out
(lindows.com). It does, for example, run as root with no passwords -- a
behavior usually regarded as abomination among the Linux crowd.

Red Hat, I predict, will for quite some time be far more interested in
the opinions expressed by people running Fedora in networked workstation
environments, since this is where the resource allocation is much more
likely to pay off in the short run (though sometimes they turn a deaf
ear to some of our complaints /*cough*gconf*cough*/). They are a
business, and they have to figure out a way to make money on free
software, which is no easy task. :)

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Riabitsev <icon at linux.duke.edu>
Linux at DUKE