Some thoughts on "ESR: Goodbye Fedora"

[Timothy Murphy]

I read the article by ESR,
and agree that it was difficult to tell from his rant
exactly what problem it was that he had encountered.

Personally, I haven't found that yum has deteriorated
in any way; it seems to me much better than
the update program I used with the old RH distributions.

I ran Ubuntu for a while recently
(it was on a second-hand laptop I bought)
and it didn't seem to me any better or worse
than Fedora in this respect.
I went back to Fedora because I was running that
on other machines, and it seemed easier
to run the same distribution on all.

(What struck me forcibly was that there was
much more difference between KDE an Gnome
than there was between different distributions.)

However, I do feel that the hostile reaction to ESR
is counter-productive.
One weakness as I see it with Fedora
is that there is no mechanism for feedback.
Nobody knows as far as I can see what problems people meet,
unless they post bugzillas
(which in my experience is a fairly useless exercise).

While the documentation project is certainly a worthy aim
it seems to me to have become excessively bureaucratic,
with more discussion about the techniques of documentation
than the actual content of the documents.
(In my experience beautifully produced documents
are if anything less likely to be helpful
than the simplest of texts.)




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland