Five basic principles for Fedora, from a server perspective.

Jon Masters jonathan at jonmasters.org
Wed Sep 1 04:37:54 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 17:55 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 17:12 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 04:56:21PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > > > 3. Fedora is Unix-like
> > [...]
> > >  I'd also like to quote from a blogpost about gnome-os and gnome3:
> > > 
> > > "What lies underneath is mostly just implementation detail. What matters
> > > is what we expose to the user and the developer. I propose that we take
> > > notes from Android, WebOS, Meego, and others and consider Linux an
> > > implementation detail and start to define the OS as we see fit."
> > > 
> > > That's from 
> > > 
> > > http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2010/08/01/shell-yes/
> > > 
> > > how do you reconcile #3 there with that?
> > > 
> > > b/c I am having a difficult time doing that.
> > 
> > Is there something more to that post then conflation of a desktop
> > environment with an "OS"? There's multiple places where one can draw the
> > line, from "only the kernel is the OS" all the way up to this view. But
> > fundamentally, here, Gnome shell or whatever is just a fancy application
> > stack running on top of something else.
> 
> And all the intervening layers required to get there.

There's one *giant problem* with that blog post. All of the examples
refer to non-general purpose Operating Systems intended for specific use
cases, such as cellphone or a web tablet. If I wanted Fedora to be just
for my cellphone or for an iPad on my desk, I'd stab my eyes out right
now and be done with it. Yes, those other OSes can take for granted that
they're supplying everything (and they do a very good job at coherence,
managing upgrades, user experience, all the things not happening here),
but we could do just as well having a stable, cohesive core platform.

Jon.




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