ESR: Goodbye Fedora

[Mike McCarty]

Steffen Kluge wrote:
> 
> On 22/02/2007, at 2:06 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 

[snip]

> Firstly, I replaced my firewall and Internet exposed servers with  
> OpenBSD boxes a couple of years ago. The OpenBSD camp are stuck-up  and 
> hostile bunch, but with the sheer number of security patches my  Linux 
> boxes required on a regular basis I just didn't feel  comfortable 
> anymore to put them in the first line.

You can make this same criticism for any of the *NIX like OS groups,
though things are improving. *NIX with its cryptic, often only two
letter commands, and command switches no two of which look similar
to each other, *breeds* guru mentality.

[snip]

> I'm getting older though, my days seem to get shorter and I need to  get 
> stuff done. There isn't a lot of time for tinkering and fixing  stuff on 
> the spot anymore. I needed something that just works most of  the time, 
> without debugging. I've become a user, and as such joined  the rest of 

In short, fiddling with an OS is not a hobby for you, nor for many.
Linux, in general, is for fiddlers and those for whom such fiddling
is a hobby. I have worked on and supported and written enough OS
that fiddling with OS is not something that interests me any more,
either. Fedora is the most extreme of the Linux in this respect.

If installing and fiddling is not your "thing", then Fedora is not
for you.

[snip]

> After those two invasions I'm still running Linux on my corporate  
> desktop at work and on a few servers at home, and don't intent to  
> change that. But for day-to-day desktop/media/end-user stuff I've  
> pretty much given up on Linux. Now, you could blame that on Fedora,  but 
> I don't think it would have turned out any different if I had  been 
> using another distro. In the end, user experience wins, and  Apple 
> appears to be the only player that fully groks this.

I'm not so sure about that. My girlfriend, at my suggestion, is running
Debian, and it works well enough, and is stable enough.

> Of course, Apple have an unfair advantage, they make their own  hardware...

Well, they *market* their own hardware.

> Please don't take this post as a pro-Apple rant, I was just trying to  
> express that people (other than just ESR) can become frustrated at  
> various aspects of a home computing environment that doesn't give the  
> user a star to steer by but seems to be chaotic and rudderless all  the 
> time. I will certainly keep open-minded and closely follow the  Fedora 
> project.

Linux has one really big flaw in one sense...

It has no rudder at all. Linux is not a product. Some distros
attempt to be somewhat a product. Fedora makes no bones about
it: Fedora Core is NOT A PRODUCT, IT IS A PROJECT.

Mike
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