"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Máirín Duffy]

> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:
>> Apparently we were able to achieve both the latest and stability
>> several releases ago, though?

On 10/15/2009 11:04 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> Not really.
>
> I have a few explanations for this:

Seth, I understand your argument, and I do understand visioning Fedora 
to be a proving ground for leading technology. However, I don't believe 
'leading-edge' is mutually exclusive with 'usable.' There's a spectrum 
within leading-edge where it's too unstable to be usable v. leading edge 
at just the right sweet spot / pace that it's still functional. Couldn't 
we aim for the latter?

What's the point of being leading-edge if it's so hard to use that 
nobody can actually check it out, learn from it, appreciate it? It's 
like a shopkeeper opening up a shop with amazing unique products, but 
keeping erratic and unposted hours, yet somehow expecting to have happy 
loyal customers and to make a profit. She'll have a limited population 
of extremely loyal customers, but feel frustrated that she seems unable 
to expand. Is that where Fedora is today?

I have a bachelor's degree in computer science, a master's degree in 
human-computer interaction, and I have been using Linux since I was in 
high school. I love technology - many women are addicted to 
shoe-shopping, but I'm instead addicted to shopping new electronic 
gadgets. Software freedom is essentially my religion, and I've reserved 
a big chunk of my heart and soul for Fedora.

Yet I am NOT happy to live with the scenario described in the postscript 
below. If *I* have a hard time dealing with it, how do we expect people 
who aren't total Fedora groupies and religious about free software to deal?

Is Fedora truly not for me?

~m

--

p.s. I use Fedora 11, not rawhide. While I was typing this email, my 
battery reached 3% capacity and gnome-power-manager prompted me to plug 
in my AC adapter. Instead of charging the battery, which certainly had 
enough juice for me to continue on (10 unplugged minutes left), plugging 
in the AC adapter triggered the machine to go into suspend. I was 
interrupted for 5+ blood-rising minutes while I waited for the machine 
to go into suspend, waited for it to settle, then hit a key to prompt it 
to come back. Then I had to attempt 6 or 7 times to get the fingerprint 
reader to unlock the screensaver dialog because GNOME screensaver 
doesn't let me type in my password with fingerprint enabled. I then had 
to re-connect my network, type in my keyring password, and re-connect to 
my VPN. Finally I was able to get back to this email.

Note this is F11, and F11 is supposed to be a stable Fedora release. If 
my machine didn't play well with suspend (it occasionally crashes while 
suspending and never comes back), I would have lost all of my open work 
on this machine just now.

This is maybe the 10th time this suspend scenario has happened to me 
with gnome-power-manager in the past month or so. I've lost quite a bit 
of work due to it. What can I do? I am powerless except to train myself 
to always keep my laptop plugged in (not great for my battery), and when 
I can't and my power runs low, I must drop everything I am doing, save 
ALL of my work, shut the computer down, plug it in, and then turn it 
back on.

I don't necessarily think we need to have everything perfect and stable. 
But we don't want to abuse people, making them feel completely powerless 
over their computer. I think it would be worth brainstorming ways we can 
empower our users to deal with these types of problems.