Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)
Lamar Owen
lowen at pari.edu
Mon Sep 10 13:50:37 UTC 2007
On Sunday 09 September 2007, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 15:11:52 -0500,
>
> Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd categorize it as saying it doesn't meet the needs of most people who
> > could be using Linux as their desktop machine. The people 'here' are a
>
> And so what. That isn't the distro it is trying to be. That is more of an
> Ubuntu goal.
Having done significant testing on Ubuntu (primarily because of the superior
software repository and lack of the 'mixing' issues), and having done some
support of 'ordinary' users on Ubuntu, let me say this: when it comes to the
kernel interfaces, Ubuntu suffers the same fate as Fedora does. Have to do
that same things if you want to run VMware, for instance. The kernel
interface issue is upstream, and any distribution tracking 2.6 is going to
have unstable kernel API's. It is not a Fedora disease; it is a kernel
development process disease, and it's broken.
The decision to drop having a stable, security-updated, kernel line stinks.
If you run a CentOS or RHEL base, you are going to have a stable kernel with
security updates, backported by Red Hat. But, you know, I've had a few
issues even there, where a kernel update did weird things (like reorder
NIC's, remove support for an older RAID controller, etc). Reading the
release notes and changelog isn't even enough for some of these patches; one
must in some cases track the actual source RPM patchsets and changes, on
certain hardware. At least the VMware binary modules drop in happily without
a recompile.
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
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