Trends - how to save Fedora ?

[Alan Cox]

> Erm, no. Each Fedora release has brought in numerous technical
> improvements. Virtualization, clustering, directory services, more and
> more features and performance per release.

That's a politicians answer. It's completely ignoring the point raised.

It doesn't matter how many features a new release has if it doesn't even
run properly on lots of systems. Most of the features are also
irrelevant to most of the users. In F15 you could at least make the case
that Gnome3 was relevant to users even if some hated it and chunks of the
code were at best prototype state. (and I'd note the Phoronix survey data
suggests that Gnome 3 is rather more liked than some might think from
list traffic)

But clustering and directory services, like forcing LVM on hapless end
users are really irrelevant to most. LVM wasn't a big deal for those who
knew better - disable it on install and your disk I/O improves, and
its become vaguely relevant with crypto. All of this is painting the
fences and hanging bling on a core product which is getting a bit
wobblier every release

It's bloated
It picks bad user defaults
It ships a default desktop which burns CPU horribly

> And what? All the engineers at Red Hat develop new tech in Fedora. Where
> do you propose those new technologies come from if Red Hat splits off?

Perhaps the Red Hat engineers could QA their new technologies a bit
more before including them ?

I don't buy the "big problem" claim here. Several other releases have
been a bit wobbly especially out of the box first release. Nor do a few
crash reports in themselves form a statistically valid sample.

I do think that as has happened a couple of times before now it's time
Fedora spent a release or two being more conservative on new toys and
fixing the ones it already has.

> > Linux distros:
> > http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux/all/y
> 
> Without knowing a *lot* about how this information was gathered, it's
> meaningless.

Ah the cult of Gnome defence - insert fingers in ears and keep shouting
loudly "We can't hear you, we can't hear you, anything we don't agree
with is biased"

(to be fair I note you point to some sensible stats further down)

> Red Hat as a company is poised to be a billion dollar company this year
> (FY12). The FY 2006 earnings were $278.3 million.[1] That's a 4X
> increase in just 6 years. That's *amazing* growth.

RHEL is IMHO a good product, with well thought out services around it,
but it's not Fedora, and I really don't want to think how 'we've
redesigned all your init scripts and broken compatibility' would go down
in a meeting with a major banking client. I suspect 'The door is that
way, Sir, goodbye and tell the Oracle salesman to come in as you leave'

> Look at things like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics, which
> indicate that downloads and torrents are going up with each release, not
> down.

Be careful that downloads are a lagging indicator of success. They go up
after you get it right not as, and they go down after you get it wrong,
not as...

Alan