"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Tim Burke <tburke at redhat.com> wrote:
>> sounds like RHEL
>
> And more on that point... I would have liked to have know what the
> expected length of deployment of those highly technical clients are
> and what the workloads actually are.... and where in the software
> stack the instabilities are for them.      Are we talking general
> productivity applications? Are we talking about general desktop
> framework instability?  Are we talking about development tool chain
> instability for in-house code development? Are we talking about
> scientific analysis toolkit instability? Are we talking about
> something even more niche than scientific analysis?

For the most the problems people have pointed out are the following:

1) Broken desktop tools in the middle of a release cycle. Having to
figure out why conferencing tools arent after updates when they worked
before was a big change for a set of desktops at one site.
2) Daily reboot/update with no idea why was one set of complaints I
got an earful recently.
3) Functionality that was there easily before going away next release
with brand new tools that never seem to get the functionality back.
4) Need to be on the internet ALWAYS (which turned out to be that
trying to get packages off of a DVD or even an 'updated' DVD was much
harder lately than in the past. Having to walk a technician on adding
a package in the field of some test device is not what they want to
deal with.
5) The cluster people who were using it to base off their next
clusters off of EL-6 have no idea if Fedora is ever polished enough to
want to look at future EL's.

Most of these people do not mind rebuilding their boxes every 6
months... but add the above and the promises that Ubuntu and SuSE
people say comes clearer and clearer.  Part of this is change of
perception.. at one point people looked at Fedora as Alpha/Beta RHEL.
then it was seen as a good way to get a good desktop without having to
use Windows like they are supposed to. Now a lot of questions I get
are more on the lines of "What is Fedora doing these days?"

One of the issues is a lot of these people are innovators. They use
what is the latest but they inversely want to be able to read their
email everyday without fiddling with tools. And they have long
memories.. screw around with them too many times and 15 years later
they are telling their grad students how you can't trust XYZ and never
use it in the lab.


> Highly technical users... aren't necessarily using their systems for
> highly technical workloads. It would be nice to understand what the
> workload is and what the specific instability gripes are.
>
> -jef
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning