Feedback on the Linux Action Show review of Fedora 13

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hello Bryan and Chris,

As usual,  here is my feedback on your review of Fedora 13 at
http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/?p=1976.  While I understand that the
review was from a desktop end user perspective, Fedora's focus is
different and that might be useful to keep in mind.  The target audience
for Fedora is described in our overview and here is a reference:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base

Having said that, let me go through the details and respond to some
specific points in the review.

* Btrfs is not supported in the Live images as noted in our release
notes.   Our live images pre-formatted and compressed Ext4 ones and that
is the reason it is super fast to install.  We trade it some flexibility
(no choice of packages or support for other filesystems) for speed
(typically the entire installation is just a couple of mins). You will
have to use the non-live images if you want to try out the experimental
support for Btrfs.   I have made sure that the announcement of Fedora 13
points out this detail as well.   Our current draft is at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_announcement

There are lots of new exciting new features and I would love to see the
show cover more. 

*  Chris noted that our wiki page on PackageKit missing items and third
party repositories were user unfriendly and I thought it could use some
improvements as well. 

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageKit_Items_Not_Found#Missing_Codec

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

Hope you find it more friendlier now. 

*  Shotwell :  While you are comparing F-Spot and Shotwell,  I should
note that F-Spot has not been included by default in Fedora Live image
for several releases.  Fedora desktop team had a discussion about
replacing Gthumb with Shotwell and  I proposed that we install Shotwell
instead of F-Spot in the non-live image as well.  It seems you have
doubts about the reasons why and instead of me explaining it to you,  I
would note that all these discussions happen transparently and you can
read through it at

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2010-March/005883.html

Shotwell is a really fast and awesome application and it didn't feel
like you folks had taken a good look at it.  I highly recommend
importing some pics and playing with it more. As I indicated before in
my feedback on the last review,  the reason why we have less apps is
because we opted to provide more comprehensive local support out of the
box.  We considered doing a Live DVD image instead for this release but
decided against it during the development process.  We will re-evaluate
that decision for the next release.  

* Openoffice.org :  Bryan mentioned that the Openoffice.org version is
outdated.  I am not sure why he though so but that is incorrect.  We
include the very latest stable release:  3.2.0

$ rpm -q openoffice.org-core
openoffice.org-core-3.2.0-12.21.fc13.i686

*  GNOME PackageKit:  We are working on a alternative frontend that is
more focused on application installation than the current interface. 
You can follow progress at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ApplicationInstaller

--

Thanks for the review and I hope to continue the discussions.

Rahul