Crashes of tainted kernels

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:57 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-03-17 at 21:22 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> Sounds like a UI bug.
>
> Agreed.  And, it would appear, that becomes a "don't really care about
> fixing it" issue, as sound still works, even if the controls are
> backwards.
>
>> Are you talking about tainted kernels (3rd party, out of tree kernel
>> modules)? Or are you talking about something completely different?
>
> Standard Fedora install, out of the box.
>
> But I was just using that as an example of an experience with making bug
> reports.

OK no offense but that's close to hijacking the thread because it's
really that unrelated to tainted kernels. An ignored bug for package A
does not mean other bugs for other packages will be ignored. The
relationship between Fedora and upstreams is highly varied. The degree
to which Fedora packagers can manipulate upstream code is highly
varied. This is non-obvious, but it's an inevitable outcome to all
distro models. All of them have this problem to varying degrees.

A big quandry I think all Linux distros face is to what degree they
are, or can be, an OS, rather than merely a collection of packages.
The unwillingness, or inability, of distros to merely recommend let
alone insist, on upstream features or bug priorities really limits the
total end goal cohesiveness any Linux distro can get to in becoming
more of an OS. It's a huge challenge.

A big part of how Google has made Android an OS is essentially by
kicking out upstreams and replacing packages with those of their own
making. Windows and OS X are even more extreme examples. All video
drivers are all supplied by Apple with OS X, there is no such thing as
a 3rd party download.

The widening gap between developer and user continues to be a problem,
and self rewarding, and to some degree Linux distros are all accepting
this. Systems are getting a lot more capable, and a lot more
complicated, but the development environments are not scaling to users
the way they are for developers. The user as the developer is
increasingly left behind.

That's a big part of the Xerox PARC and early Apple story that was
fairly quickly abandoned by Apple - the idea of the user being the
developer, and everything being discoverable, understandable, and the
user had the source for all of it right in front of them on their
device by default.

How do you convince OSS developers to create the DE they've always
wanted for themselves that also makes them obsolete (or superfluous)?
And are those really the contradiction they seem to be?


-- 
Chris Murphy