A dream of a Red hat linux for desktop PC ?

[Wong Kwok-hon]

On 2/24/07, James Wilkinson <fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk> wrote:
> Phil Meyer wrote:
> > Preference is the only real issue.  That is a good thing.
> >
> > yes, there is a company behind Fedora that has a very fixed motive for
> > what it wants out of Fedora.  When there is a conflict of interest
> > between RedHat and the Fedora community, the community CAN win, but
> > seldom does.  That can be both good and bad.
>
> Um. What do you have in mind?
>
> I can think of five possible areas where the community and the company
> could be said to be in disagreement.
>
> One is that Red Hat will only support Fedora for so long. They've made
> it quite clear that the community are welcome to support it for longer,
> and provided infrastructure to enable this. The result was the Legacy
> project...
>
> One is the basic rules of the game. Fedora was set up to be a Free
> Software only distribution, and won't touch patented software without
> some sort of legal cover. Eric Raymond doesn't like that, and nor do
> many other people. They want to turn Fedora into something it isn't --
> which they're welcome to do, they just can't call it Fedora and they
> can't use Red Hat funded infrastructure.
>
> And then there's the high turnover of updates. That's much the same
> thing -- it would be easy for someone with sufficient bandwidth to
> provide a "security and serious bugfix only" yum repo for supported
> Fedora distributions, supplying selected official updates. They could
> probably even call it Fedora.
>
> Arguably, there's support for Xen in the Fedora kernels. It's in largely
> because Red Hat wants it for the RHEL kernels, but Dave Jones (Fedora
> kernel maintainer) has argued long and loud that it makes his job a lot
> harder, and makes it harder to update to current kernels. (For example,
> the latest Fedora kernel is 2.6.19, while 2.6.20 has been out nearly
> three weeks. This is very largely due to the problem of integrating
> Xen).
>
> Finally, as a result, Dave Jones is very nervous about kernel modules
> that aren't in the upstream kernel.org tree and aren't in the official
> Fedora RPMs, considering them virtually impossible to support.
>
> I'm not sure that in any area Red Hat "wins" except that there are some
> things it doesn't want to fund, and other areas where Red Hat funding is
> limited. It's difficult to argue with that.
>
> But the community *certainly* wins -- we've got Fedora!
>
> I'd note that there *are* a number of distributions where people have
> done exactly what I suggest -- taken Fedora and modified it to suit
> themselves: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions. It's
> arguable that RHEL fits exactly into that category.
>
> James.
>

I think application in Fedora Core is freezing in some place for
example Firefox, openoffice and desktop environment gnome,KDE version.
There are not depended on kernel version and when some version
released. They just stopped in testing period and no update present.

Fedora Legacy is a good idea so far but it is not shut down... Who
knows it re-open or not.
Also I think Fedora Core should have a more open mind for installing
more software on above as I said.

I remember that when I use Fedora Core 2 it has a bug in installation
and Fedora Core 3 also has a bug in hardware recognize. Now kernel 586
was installed when some user used Pentium 2 higher CPU.

Although kernel maintainer is a good and kindly people and did a great
contribution. but I think there can be more better and not cause user
need to re-install in every version.

And I felt Fedora Core become kernel minded. No one knows what will
have a new version of applications for normal(for desktop word
processor,internet use) user.

You also said that it is related to fund...But I think Debian also has
a same problem but why they did a great job ? What's difference ?

And I think Red Hat 9 as a last and stable product. Community should
or can provide more support it because it can provide to normal user.
We should upgrade there libraries or application.

I think the Fedora Core direction is difference by others more people
did a great jobs. Supporting and maintaining it is a great things.
Life time should be review and not just short. Operating System
lifetime is short as I felt. I know fast development is need but is it
need to release a new version so fast ?? Is it necessary ?
I remember that when every new version released. I performed yum
update to new version. But failed every time... I haven't install new
or other software inside.
I think upgrade program should be also reviewed and make sure there is
work not just release a new CD and want user to use clean install.

The above are my thought...as I used from FC2 to now...and saw some
problem came out...

Wong Kwok Hon