The Future of Fedora.

Otto Haliburton ottohaliburton at comcast.net
Wed Dec 10 03:09:16 UTC 2003


> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-devel-list-admin at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-devel-list-
> admin at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Konstantin Riabitsev
> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 6:30 PM
> To: fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: The Future of Fedora.
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> --
While I agree with much of what you say, in the corporate world redhat and
etc. will serve the purpose of cutting work station cost, i.e. they are
looking to go multi-user cheaply with a smaller platform and I think this is
where things are headed.  As for the work station environ, rh and etc can
provide quite a choice if they choose to.  The thing is they are trailing
Windows in acceptability(I don't agree, but realistic that's where it's at).






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