Why Fedora ?

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

>The point I wanted to make with my rant was that I have observed over a
>period of time, say about three years that there "had been" very good
>progress over intuitiveness and usefulness of apps previously but in
>each new release that setup was disrupted with strange ways of doing the
>same things, some of which I elaborated previously. Now the problem
>which arises out of these disruptions is that the system which has
>reached a level of stability at desktop level is rendered useless and a
>new cycle begins to bring it back to stability and usefulness from a
>user's point of view. This I think is a wastage of resources for both
>programmers and users. Users try to grasp the new system of doing things
>and programmers try to debug or change the options. Now this sucks both
>of energy to bring something new and stabilize the system. What I mean
>with all this rant is that once an apps has reached maturity, its
>options or rather way of doing the acts should be frozen, or if that
>apps is being replaced with something new & improved then at least the
>working at user level should remain same.  A user is not concerned with
>how a thing is being done behind the covers or what wizardry a programmer
>applied in the new apps code.
>

There are two things here. One is code churn and other one is the 
changes in the user interface. End users typically dont care much about 
internal code changes like you said. The user interaction model isnt 
mature enough to be boring yet and thats not expected to settle down 
anytime soon but there is a increasingly good focus on it which is the 
'deliver the same but better' approach. Rapid development and feedback 
cycle is one of the key strengths of the development model we have 
relied upon to mature and improve the code and for a platform like 
Fedora the enhancements we get out of the feedback is shared by a large 
number of other platforms too. Now Fedora by design is a fast moving 
distribution and that obviously is appealing to a good number of users. 
When there is a larger number of updates, there is a potential higher 
chance of regressions.As have been pointed out by me earlier, one way to 
avoid this or significantly reduce the effect of disruption is for the  
active users with a suprisingly good amount of energy is to get their 
hands dirty with testing the updates ( updates-testing )or fedora 
development  repository atleast for the major changes (as specified in 
the changelog or the version numbers).

You can very well form opinions and discuss this in length but more 
participation has a much higher impact. Atleast some of the users have 
the energy and interest to do this. What are you waiting for?

regards
Rahul