How do *you* use Fedora?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

I use Fedora rawhide daily as an all-purpose desktop: administrative tasks
(budgets, taxes, etc), mail, web browsing (online stores, news, etc).

I am pretty agnostic in what I call desktop but over the years I've slowly
moved from fat clients to local web clients plugged on local 'server' apps
(postfix, amavisd-new, dovecot, squirrelmail…). In part to get the ability
to access my desktop remotely and in part due to GNOME's long-term failure
in providing apps with stable behaviour, complete feature-sets and robust
data handling (I used for example to launch evolution when at home. Now I
don't bother and open squirrelmail directly. Both evo and thundermail
never bothered with correct handling of shared maildir stores). I don't
care about the continuous chrome rewrites and experimentations when basic
functionnality does not work (for the same reasons I use the terminal all
the time instead of desktop helpers). The web apps have no fancy UI but
they get the job done reliably day after day. (OTOH OpenOffice then
LibreOffice I continue to use, so I'm not wed to web apps I just want
working no-surprise dekstop apps). IMHO there is a severe lack of
understanding FLOSS desktop-side that pretty demos win reviews and
two-weeks user tests but long-term adoption relies on long-term stability
and lack of UI surprises.

Once upon a time I wanted to explore adding entertainment media PC
functions to the desktop (I have all the required hardware, including
video capture card) but I gave up on it for pretty much the same reasons I
gave up on GNOME apps (the last straw was the killing of background
audio/video tasks by laptop-oriented developpers).

Printing robustness is a long-term sore point (when you fill admin
documents, invoices, taxes it must work now not the next day after lots of
debuging).

Due to limited free time my Fedora testing has slowly devolved into
filling abrt and selinux reports (there are enough crashes in Fedora apps
handling them does not leave any time for more in-depth reporting, which
is ignored too often anyway).

I've used Fedora and other FLOSS projects in the past to push changes i
wanted upstream, and I still use it to get an idea about the changes that
will eventually land in distro derivatives that I will see used at work
for example (I'm pretty pessimistic about Fedora adoption. RHL then Fedora
used to be in the same class than other desktop systems like windows, but
other desktop producers made huge stability efforts while Fedora moved the
other way for unfathomable reasons. Once upon a time a Linux desktop was
the solution if you wanted to avoid data loss (at the cost of being a bit
bare) now it's even more bare but completely outclassed by the competition
on the stability front.

Lately I've noticed the Games SIG packaged some interesting bits in
Fedora, and so far those bits to not fail in strange and misterious ways
and I can continue months-old games after multiple updates without strange
and mysterious time-consuming behaviour changes.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot