Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Karl Larsen]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>> On 9/11/07, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So you don't think there will ever be a Linux distribution that is
>>> usable and reliable as a desktop without having to customize and 
>>> re-test
>>> everything before letting anyone use it?
    Well, F7 was far from perfect as a Desktop system when it first came 
out. But as 3 new kernels and 140 Updates were loaded it got better and 
better for Me.
>>
>>
>> One would hope that every sysadmin test at least re-rests every
>> software solution to be deployed, regardless of OS - and if that
>> solution is modular, remove portions necessary to their situation.
    A 72 year old user of F7 in his home has zero sysadmin people. And 
it must be a reliance on far away people to send out the needed Updates. 
And that trust is well founded.
>
> That's a rather sad commentary on the state of the distributions and 
> the lack of any framework for sharing QA and configuration work, don't 
> you think, when every entity that would like to use it needs to have 
> people on staff with more expertise than the packagers that build it?  
> That seems equivalent to me to saying that before you use an 
> automobile you should have an employee take it apart and perhaps 
> replace a few components to make it suitable for its intended use.
>
    When you buy a new car you buy a lot of trouble. The newer the more 
trouble. When I was working I bought a new car every year. Now retired I 
buy used cars that have like 40,000 miles on them. I have no problems 
except the usual brake work and hose replacement. With gasoline at 
$3.00/gallon I drive a lot less.

    Back to F7. Today I'm happy with F7 and it does everything I want on 
my new Home computer and my old now Sony Laptop. I just got 140 Updates 
to the Laptop and it still gets WiFi Internet using the MadWiFi system. 
The latest kernel has it.

    Now my fear is that an Update might break something that is working 
fine. For example, right now if I double click a file.pps on my Desktop 
it brings up Open Office automatically and displays it. A file.jpg is 
clicked and it comes up and can be made full screen if desired.

    A while back all this didn't work. But it does now and I do not want 
to loose any of it. So now Updates are fewer and further between and I 
will watch each one with care. If it breaks anything I will un-install. 
The file names are right there in /ver/log/yum.log.

    F7 does a lot more than FC4 where I stopped upgrading for a couple 
of years. I will never go back there again :-)




-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.