Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Robin Laing]

On 2014-03-26 00:13, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 03/26/2014 06:45 AM, Robin Laing wrote:
>> On 2014-03-24 08:25, Liam Proven wrote:
>>> On 23 March 2014 21:56, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>
>>>> Nowadays you may have SSDs which supposedly last longer when not
>>>> written much to but mostly read from, so you might put the
>>>> partitions that can be read-only on the SSDs and use magnetic disks
>>>> for things like /var, /tmp, /home and swap.
>>>
>>> Machines come with dozens of gigs of RAM now. I'm not sure there's
>>> much argument for swap at all, and personally, I use tmpfs for
>>> better performance and a self-cleaning /tmp tree.
>>
>> New machines come with dozens of gigs of ram.
> Exactly, but old one don't and old ones often can not even be upgraded.
>
> That said, consider many so-far-WinXP users currently are trying to
> migrate to other OSes. I can't deny finding it poor, Fedora is not an
> option to many of them, because of Fedora's memory requirements [1].
>
> Ralf
>
> [1] From my experience, F20 can be made runable on machines with 512MB
> RAM, but is hardly installable because the installer requires somewhat
> less than 1GB RAM.
>

But that is the move forward with all OS's.

I agree, for XP users, the need for 1 or 2 gig is going to be a limit. 
I have a couple of machines that have 250M of ram and I had to swap 
around memory modules to get an install on one of them.  Now they are 
just testing machines for drives and hardware things.


I would love to get all these Win XP users onto Linux, preferably Fedora 
but if it won't install, then there is no path to that choice.

Maybe the work for the Raspberry Pi could be looked at as an option for 
smaller machines.

But the direction Fedora isn't to look backwards but forwards.