Target market?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7/25/07, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 03:06 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 12:06 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 23:38 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:34:47 -0400
> > > > "Luis Villa" <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > (Of course, another option is that my desire for a polished desktop
> > > > > experience may be best met by someone doing a polished desktop spin of
> > > > > Fedora rather than by having Fedora work on desktop polish at all, and
> > > > > that Fedora should merely enable that and work to get fixes/polish
> > > > > upstream where possible.)
> > > >
> > > > There really isn't a reason why enterprising folks couldn't make a High
> > > > Polish Desktop spin of Fedora, or help rel-eng to make it.  It just
> > > > needs somebody to drive it.  I couldn't successfully drive a Desktop
> > > > spin for F7, maybe somebody who understands the target better can.
> > >
> > > That's what we try to do right now.  I am pretty much coming to the
> > > conclusion that "High Polish" can't really be done as an add-on.  You
> > > need the ability to make the whole distro change (eg, what ubuntu does
> > > to debian).  If we want Fedora to be a competitive desktop, we need to
> > > make Fedora a desktop.
> > >
> >
> > So if we take this out to it's next obvious conclusion: where does that
> > leave the upstream consumer of Fedora: RHEL? Or any server-oriented
> > initiative based around fedora, for that matter?
> I am quite irritated whenever reading about "servers" vs. "desktop"
> vs. ...
>
> IMO, servers, desktops etc. are "just setups" of one an the same modular
> basis. They don't necessarily collide.
>
> If they do, to me this means deficiencies of the setup tools and/or
> packaging.
>

THe collision is about resources of who si going to focus on what. The
terms are used because for the most part, people rolling out large
number of servers use different timeframes for technology renewal than
people rolling out desktops. I have a good number of servers that are
still running RHEL-3 and will probably be running them til 2009 or so.
My clients want desktops with newer stuff and so RHEL-5 is already
cramped for rollout. The conflict is that server software wants a lot
of long term support, and desktop support doesnt. WIth a limited
number of engineering resources.. you have a conflict.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"