Gathering community feedback...

[Draciron Smith]

Stephen

Forums are the primary source of feedback/discussion/help for most people.
Forums are THE main support mechanism for almost all software unless they
have live phone/IM tech support.  Which of course normally doesn't exist for
free software such as Fedora. Firefox has an interesting experiment going on
with IM support and I'm fairly impressed with it so far.   So fedoraforums
is THE place to get support for most users. .  As for the best answer again
Fedoraforums on many subjects contains THE best answer to a commonly faced
problem. The FAQs are updated far more often than even the docs wiki and
provide more workable solutions in many cases.  Fedoraforums.org deserves
better treatment from Fedora than it has gotten.

There are things about all distros that make you grind your teeth in
frustration and if they aggravate you enough people generally change distro
or write their own solution and fairly often that solution gets pulled into
the upstream if enough people adopt it or at worst become commonly used.
Fedora lacks any facility to send upstream feedback. Lacks any feedback
mechanism at all.  It is true Microsoft has managed to repeatedly incur the
wrath of it's user base and survived, at least for now. As more people
discover Linux and the popularity of Mac's smaller devices replaces PCs for
many people the age of Microsoft may well be nearing an end.  Microsoft is
the exception not the role model for how to do business. Even Microsoft if a
high enough percentage of it's user base screams will eventually hear and
change what it's doing. Fedora is completely deaf to user feedback.

Yes I'm unhappy with Fedora. I'm exploring various distros right now.  I
have even been putting out feelers to see if there's enough interest in
forking off Fedora. Gotten lots of interest from end users but almost none
from developers unfortunately.  However that's not the point.

RedHat has been critical for the advancement of Linux since the days of RH5.
The loss of RedHat would be a devastating blow to the Linux community and if
RedHat doesn't start listening to it's user base it's demise is most
assured. It won't be tomorrow, it'll take years for the fallout to
eventually show up but when it does the momentum will be impossible to
reverse.  I'd really hate to see that and what distro I'm using really
doesn't matter.  The loss of the drivers DB alone would harm the Linux
world. Drivers are by far the biggest obstacle to wider Linux use and RedHat
is the biggest source of drivers for the Linux community.  So no matter what
distro I use RedHat's well being is an important consideration for me.

No this is not the correct place to discuss this, the problem is there IS NO
good place to put comments like this. NO POSSIBLE WAY TO GIVE FEEDBACK TO
THE FEDORA PROJECT. That IS THE PROBLEM.   Fedora has no interest in it or
Infrastructure would be the group tasked with the interface for the
feedback.  The actual feedback itself would be sent upstream for filtering
and consideration.

I've raised this topic in forums and  other formats and I am FAR from alone
in my feelings on this. I speak for many when I say these things.

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 11:58, Draciron Smith <draciron at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
> > Go down to support options. Under forum it links you to fedoraforum.org.
> It
> > has for years now.  I think I first joined Fedoraforums.org back when FC4
> or
> > FC5 was out.
>
> I see that, but I don't think it is shown as being THE place for users
> to go. On the other hand I don't think that is really the point of
> your emails. You are unhappy with the direction with Fedora and I can
> understand and sympathize. In the end, I want people to find what
> makes them happy, and if Fedora is not doing it.. please do go find
> someplace that will do so.
>
> I have no plan to kick people off the list for opinions I think we
> have all had at one time or another. I won't say this is the best
> avenue for getting anything done with it.. but I understand. Good luck
> with your next OS.
>
>
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