Project Stick In The Mud :-)

[Russell Miller]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Arthur Pemberton <pemboa at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> A newbie would likely either stick with the OSS drivers, (assuming
> they get at least 1024x768) or they would Google it, or they would
> give up.
>

That last option is to me what's inexcusable.  We (and by "we" I mean the
community) shouldn't be marketing things to newbies so that they attempt to
install it, spend a week trying to get something working, then give up and
install windows again, with a permanent bad taste in their mouth regarding
linux.  Say what you want about Gentoo - at least it makes no pretenses.

>
> Also, I personally think that Fedora should have an explicit warning
> against use by computer newbies (ie. people not interested in fiddling
> with their install at all) -- this is a separate topic, but I fee that
> Fedora's FOSS idealism (which I like) currently stands in the way of
> ease of use due to he behavior of most hardware manufactures.
>

But then we have stuff like NetworkManager, which seems to be in place
solely to make Fedora easier to use by newbies - and in the process screwing
people who actually *do* know what they're doing and just having stuff like
that get in the way.

Why is it so difficult to turn pulseaudio off?  Why did NetworkManager keep
restarting itself after I shut it down - even to the point of *shutting off
the services*?  Why was SElinux introduced in such a halfassed way that my
default behavior on any new fedora install was to shut it off?  Why was KDE
4 introduced when it was not ready for primetime?  (I really dislike it, I
would have rather stuck with 3.5 and had 4.0 as an option - it wouldn't have
been all that much more difficult to do a side by side and a way to select
between them.  And I was a KDE developer!)

It seems like I'm being hard on you guys.  OK, I am.  But it's just because
I see what Fedora was and could still be, and instead I'm sitting here
fighting with it because it's done in such an unpolished and schizophrenic
manner.

--Russell
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