Wish list

[Mike Hearn]

On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 15:44:57 -0500, Patrick Barnes wrote:
> I tend to disagree on some aspects.  I think Fedora Core is starting to
> be good enough for end users.

There's real opportunity to market Linux to people coming up - with all
the great work Red Hat/NSA have been doing on security you can actually
say "Linux is fundamentally more secure than Windows, and will remain
secure as it gets popular" and believe it ... security sells, as the
Firefox developers will attest. 

Mudflap and SELinux might be slightly weird names but ExecShield is
catchy (props to whoever invented that name!), so why aren't we doing an
Apple: giving them ambiguous glowing balls for logos and slapping them on
the website?

That said, currently two problems that would stop me installing Fedora
for very non-technical users:

- Auto update is not reliable/graphical enough, or never has been for me.
  Maybe it's fixed in FC4.
- Auto update breaks nvidia drivers every few weeks

If Fedora was more like Ubuntu in these aspects (fully graphical/automatic
auto update, supporting nvidia drivers out of the box) I'd be confident
enough to install it for a friend and then go away on holiday or
whatever, and not come back expecting trouble. Wouldn't necessarily be
*liked*, but wouldn't actually break (I'm talking from experience of
doing exactly that here). Need better MSN support and maybe a faster
OpenOffice to be really comfortable.

For users who are perhaps confident with computers but not technical, ie
your average teenager/20something the other issues would be:

- Too hard to install new software (this is what autopackage is for)
- Hard to get supported wireless hardware
- Games
- L33t apps like Picasa, iTunes etc. I'd need to install Wine/Crossover
  for them myself. It's not supported by Fedora out of the box (yeah yeah
  I'm biased ;)

At least, those are the problems I've encountered before when friends have
wanted to try Linux/Fedora before. Nothing insurmountable!

thanks -mike