Leaving?

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Hans de Goede wrote:
> 
> Why should those that care tell the user how to work around a problem
> being created by people who appereantly don't care? And here we have the
> real problem, the real problem is not this update this is just an
> example the real problem is many Fedora developers seem to be so
> arrogant that they don't care about their endusers. Thank you I guess
> that is what frustates me the not caring, now can we please start
> discussing that which IMHO is the real issue and stop discussing the
> example.
> 

FWIW and even though it's probably not the best example in the world. 
Large proprietary corporations sometimes update stuff even though it 
means that a few thousand+ users will end up with a broken system. Our 
friends in Redmond are but one example. And those guys aren't even that 
biased towards technical improvement vs user friendliness.

The point is that Fedora has a dedicated mission to provide a completely 
free OS. Because of this and a number of other things, we cannot wait 
for binary-only, non-free driver vendors to catch up all the time. This 
has been said several times before.
If we actually chose to wait for Nvidia/ATI (as an example), what other 
stuff do we need to wait for next? Perhaps a security problem in the 
kernel breaks certain binary-only network drivers? perhaps a bug release 
of glibc has the possibility of causing instabilities in a proprietary 
database engine? It's just not possible to predict, prevent and/or 
regard all of the problems that MAY arise because of unsupported stuff - 
That's why it's unsupported in the first place. And there are certainly 
no reason why such unsupported components should prolong the adaption of 
improved components for the rest of the userbase.

I'm firmly of the belief that Fedora should NOT wait for anything like 
this. Problems like these are best regarded by the 3rd party repos like 
livna or atrpms. However, I can understand the unfortunate problem for 
users who depend on the binary drivers too. My thought is that if an 
update causing problems for a non-free, binary-only driver is  not 
acceptable (it's acceptable for me and the proprietary drivers I have to 
deal with on certain Fedora machines), then they should probably choose 
a different platform for those systems (I have lots of RHEL systems too 
because of support issues with proprietary stuff too). There are several 
free and non-free projects that will be more ABI stable than Fedora (And 
there are free RHEL-like distros to choose from as well). But a lot of 
us LIKE this characteristic about Fedora. Actually all the catering to 
binary and non-free stuff are some of the things that keep me away from 
other distros for certain types of machines. I suspect a few other 
Fedora users feel the same way about this.

Again - It has absolutely nothing to do with deliberately breaking stuff 
for anyone. I don't think most of the replies in this discussion has 
been mean or arrogant. But some updates will benefit a lot of users who 
have NOT chosen to rely on a binary-only driver that the Fedora 
community or any other open community have no possible way to support 
and so this is the way it essentially has to be.

If anything in the above sounds arrogant in any way, it's unintended.

/Thomas