Where are we going? (Not a rant)

[Dan Mashal]

This IS a rant. And this includes a few analogies. Some good, some bad.

This is one of the reasons why I chose to run for board.

Nobody really knows where Fedora is going. It's like a too many chefs problem. 

Sometimes Fedora just feels like a bunch of people/SIGs working independent of each other (Red Hat included) that eventually come together to make the entire distro. 

There needs to be a more concerted to have a direction. There needs to be more communication with end users and what they want from Fedora.

For example, the same thing happened with Gnome 3 upstream where a lot of developers left the project due to a lack of a real vision or direction.

"Let's just include the latest greatest things that are cool in the Linux world." (FIRST on FEATURES) is part of the problem.

"Let's make it look like Ubuntu because Ubuntu is popular" is another philosophy that I have seen and I have a problem with.

In addition, LTS won't solve this problem. It goes against everything Fedora stands for. A really bad analogy and half joking here: LTS should just be renamed "Slackware". If you get the analogy kudos to you.
  
In my opinion the vision needs to be changed. It feels like Fedora has turned into Rawhide more than Fedora with 17 and even more so with 18. 

If there was more testing done with Rawhide then I wouldn't feel like the 6 month release cycle may be a bit too aggressive right now.

I mean the proof is in the pudding. Spherical Cow is almost 3 months late.

Going forward, I would like to look at what the real vision and direction of Fedora should be.

In my opinion it should be a distribution that offers the latest software, but at the same time keeping stability and compatibility a #1 priority. 

At the end of the day the people that make a distro popular are the users, developers and sysadmins.

Sysadmins want things to just work as they have been for the last 15-20 years with some minor improvements that don't require them to go back and relearn everything. They don't have time for it.

Just my 2 cents.

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: devel-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:devel-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of Ralf Corsepius
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2012 9:51 PM
To: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Re: Where are we going? (Not a rant)

On 12/08/2012 06:07 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Arun SAG <sagarun at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 5:32 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" 
>> <johannbg at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> If we want to solve this we need to release an Fedora LTS release 
>>>> for our and the potential other user >base that don't have to/want 
>>>> to update every 6 or 12 months.
>>
>>
>>
>> Completely agree on this one. In my day job we started using Fedora 
>> as one of our desktop os. Then support  issues and upgrade cycle 
>> started giving nightmares to corp IT. They are looking at other 
>> avenues now. I really wish there is a LTS release for this awesome distro -  Fedora.
>
> Why does there need to be a long-term support for Fedora?

My primary problem with Fedora isn't "lack of stability", but lack of API/ABI and UI-stability/persistence/sustainability between upgrades.

In other words, I can cope with the number of crashes upgrades typically come along with, but the number "UI-changes" is what makes Fedora difficult to use for me.

> Why not just
> use Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

My view: RHEL is not an alternative to Fedora. CentOS would be a candidate alternative to Fedora, however due to the nature of its upstream and its upstream target audience (servers) it lacks a lot to be functionally "on par" with Fedora.

That said, if I was managing a larger network, I'd likely choose CentOS as base OS and harvest Fedora to setup a custom "add-on" repo.

Ralf

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