Fedora Core 6 HUGE problem - Binary drivers.

[Les Mikesell]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:

  >> Users lose either of these ways.  The first question is why does 
anyone
>> who has a working kernel and device drivers _ever_ need to install a 
>> behavior-changing replacement - and particularly within an FCx release 
> 
> When they want a feature in the new kernel. Features I am personally looking
> forward to is the removal of the limit of arguments to exec and dmcrypt
> getting write barrier support back.
> 
>> where the next one is only months away? If there is an answer to that 
> 
> Your assuming that there will be an nVidia driver for the next Fedora release.
> That isn't necessary going to be the case.

But that's not a big problem until updates stop for the current release. 
   You can put off installing a new release as long as necessary.  A 
kernel update within a release that breaks needed drivers is a big problem.

> I think trying to make Fedora for everyone is a mistake. It's current missions
> of using all free software (now including build tools, making it almost a
> source based distro) and keeping up with very recent versions of software
> included fits what I want very well. It isn't a no headache system though.
> For people admining their own system that want something that just works,
> Ubuntu seems to be the system of choice these days.

Don't forget fedora's 'other' purpose of evolving to near-verbatim RHEL 
releases - which then has the problem of frozen application versions for 
the long, long term between those releases.  I agree that the current 
fedora disto acting as a fast-changing testbed is a necessary evil, but 
I wish there were something that used the same packaging and admin 
techniques that would make a usable desktop - like an FCx release 
usually becomes for a short period near the end of its life.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com