i have to *choose* between graphical desktop and S/W dev?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 1:00 PM, David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com> wrote:
> 1) Advanced users all have different ideas of the perfect package selection
> interface and they never really align -or- if they do, no one ever uses them
> because "that's not what an advanced user would do".  For advanced users, I
> think we already have two perfectly acceptable solutions:
>     a) make your own spin
>     b) create a kickstart file


I think this is an example of a re-occurring pattern in Fedora
decision making which I consider to be misguided.


A sufficiently advanced user _could_ make their own spin, they could
make their own kickstart file. But these things are very large
resource investments, not just once but again each fedora revision to
track the changes in behaviour.

The same sufficiently advanced user could forgo fedora or any other
distribution entirely and build up their GNU/Linux system from source
tarballs.   Advanced users use fedora because making your own
distribution is an enormous resource expenditure, and we're willing to
tolerate some decisions we wouldn't have personally made in order to
avoid expending those resources.

Every single customization I make to my fedora system reduces the
benefit that Fedora provides. It wastes my time now, and it wastes it
once to several times per year as Fedora updates and releases come out
which break my non-standard configuration.

At least for me, I tolerate things that I think which suck about
fedora in many cases rather than customizing because at least the harm
is bound— If I customize there is no telling how deep the rabbit hole
goes.

I can accept that providing more choices has a cost, especially to
inexperienced users.  But failing to provide importance choices also
has a cost.  It's valid to weigh these costs, but not valid to take
the cost to advanced users as zero simply because of their crime of
experience.

When both are weighed a reasonable compromise can be found... things
like a zero option install, with an advanced tab hiding a nice array
of buttons.   Inexperienced users are saved confusion, advanced users
don't have to become fedora build system experts twice a year.

Obviously Fedora can not satisfy every possible mutually exclusive
advanced configuration, and Fedora ought not adopt an advanced-user
friendly behaviour which is actively harmful to less sophisticated
users.   But I see many cases of "oh, advanced users can customize"
being bandied about in cases where no such conflict exists, used as
the justification for removing and hiding features and changing
defaults in ways that give no benefit to the common user, and I think
that practice is bogus.