ESR: Goodbye Fedora

[Michael A Peters]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 10:52 +1000, Res wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, M. Fioretti wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 09:59:03 AM +1000, Res (res at ausics.net) wrote:
> >
> >> Maybe :), but he has a couple things I agree with, RH/Fedora is losing
> >> ground on desktop share, because people want things to just work,
> >
> 
> > "things to just work" and "bleeding edge by design" just cannot mix,
> 
> They can, there is no reason at all, lets say a media player software 
> wont, well unless you bastardise it like Fedora does, once you start 
> ommitting parts of the authors original known working code, you no longer 
> have a working guarantee.

What has redhat bastardized?
They remove patent problem code from gstreamer-plugins.
That code is not even necessary if you disable the plugins at build
time.

> 
> > In this sense yes, Fedora is not, can not, and does not want to be the first
> > distribution for Windows refugees.
> 
> Correct, unlike RedHat X.XX days. This is why Fedora has lost a very 
> significant hold of desktop.

There have always been other distros that grabbed marketshare by
attracting noobs and then faded. Ubuntu isn't fading as fast as I
thought it would, maybe it is here to stay, but Fedora in my experience
is a lot nicer than Red Hat was - even for noobs.

> 
> 
> >> Secondly, the version upgrade is messy

Yes it is. I don't do it.
It's messy on Windows too. After applying SP2 on my laptop, I could not
boot. Had to go into rescue mode. Problem was a virus checker.

Upgrading has horror story scenarios on almost every OS.

This is why /home should be a separate LV by default - to allow for
clean installs. Installer should look at the rpm database of the
previous install, and as an option, have a clean install where the
installer selects whatever packages previously were installed that are
available.

Thus - user preserves /home data (and /srv data if that's separate) and
gets a clean install similar to their previous configuration.