leaving fedora

[Jon Ciesla]

> Hello,
>
> I am leaving fedora (though not EPEL), and since I have been quite
> vocal in the last months, I thought it would deserve some explanation.
> All that follows is highly subjective, and I don't think it
> should lead to much discussion, and since it is very subjective, I
> won't give names or facts to prove what I say, these are my feelings.
>
> My use case is old non desktop stuff, fluxbox, xdm, vim, xterms,
> mutt, irssi, firefox, latex/texinfo, xfig, xpdf, numerical models,
> openoffice (because I have to). Fedora is unsuitable for me as a user
> since quite a long time, too much regressions, lack of interest for
> integrating what I use (xdm, no vfs daemon...) too short lived.
> But I still used it as a contributor, one of the aim being to help
> testing regressions and integrating oldish environment such that
> people in my case don't have to go through the workarounds I had to
> use in rawhide to have their setup working, while still benefiting
> from progress in free software (new hardware support, new
> frameworks...), in fedora and in RHEL+EPEL.
>
> The cost of running rawhide (or a rawhide/stable mix), has always
> been high, but it was ok, as the price for testing and being in
> touch with latest innovations. However I have clearly seen now,
> that the benefits are negligible. Many other maintainers, and
> especially many important people in fedora lead don't care about
> my use case and my bugs and patches get unanswered for months or
> years, the local fixes I have don't get propagated to other users,
> or maintainers refuse to support what I want. I don't blame the
> maintainers, supporting my use case has a cost, and even if I am
> ready to pay a part, it may still be too high for Fedora.
>
> I also feel that I have become a stranger to the fedora community.
> In the past it seems that power users like me, that is people who
> like the desktop for others but not for themselves, and like simple
> oldish UNIX stuff, were much more present, now it seems to me that
> only a tiny (but very vocal...) minority remains. One thing that
> really disturbed me was the latest FESCo election, I only voted
> for one candidate, who was not elected. People in current FESCo
> are nice and capable, indeed, but they don't represent me, and it
> was very different in the past.
>
> In the latest months, I remarked that most of the discussions
> I was involved in here turned to flamewars and in the end my
> wishes and solutions were always disregarded. Otherwise said I
> have become a noise maker, certainly impairing communication
> within the fedora project, and making everybody lose time for no
> gain.
>
> Lastly, I think that, on the packaging side, my wishes are
> fulfilled since there are now many alternate desktops (or window
> managers...) and all the display mananger I know about are
> in fedora, and correctly integrated at the packaging level.
> I also have all the command-line interfaces I want. Integration
> didn't happen though, and I now think that fedora isn't the place
> where it can happen.
>
> I really enjoyed all this time in the Fedora project, and I learned
> a lot, too. Last, I wish Fedora to be succesful, I think that Fedora
> is very useful for the advance of free software, and I thank the
> Fedora users and contributors, and RedHat support.

I'm very sorry to hear that, but I understand your reasons.  You've been a
great help and source of information. Thank you for your contribution.

Jon

> --
> Pat
>
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> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>


-- 
in your fear, speak only peace
in your fear, seek only love

-d. bowie