few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

[Les Mikesell]

Shawn Starr wrote:
>
>> File locations themselves have always been arbitrary and 
>> within a system 
>> one place is just as good as another.  
> 
> This I disagree, that was not the case originally.

OK, when tiny disk drives cost $10,000 and had to come from the same 
vendor as the CPU, and you couldn't boot from anything else there was a 
reason to have /bin and maybe /sbin separate.  But that was in some 
other century.

>It is arbitrary today because it doesn't really matter anymore/or care.

But all the good scripts linger on, so backward compatible symlinks are 
a good thing.

>> The LSB bas value exactly to the 
>> extent that every distribution follows it to the point that 3rd party 
>> software will work without regard to the distribution and I don't see 
>> that happening without installer contortions yet.   Other changes 
>> without backwards compatible symlinks just break things and 
>> are annoying.
>>

> The LSB is useful for commercial distributions not really for free distributions.

It seems very counter-productive to me for free distributions to spend 
all their time packaging up trivial variations of the same thing too.

> I don't see commercial vendors releasing software for Fedora because it changes too much,

That's a problem in its own right, for every software developer - 
nothing special about commercial vendors in that regard.

> they can't test against it changing every 6 or so months.

Who can?

> I experience this every day here at my place. 3rd party vendors do not like rapid changes especially mathematical applications that are particularly  sensitive to GCC optimizations, GNU libc, and GNU libstdc++ changes.

And that's a surprise?

> The LSB doesn't go far enough to guarantee such it only gives a ABI/API compatibility. This becomes critical when your math library is off by 0.06 fractions, ask FLUENT this.

No one likes math errors.  Isn't there a test suite for that sort of 
thing that would work at least as well as fedora users?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com