Project Stick In The Mud :-)

[Arthur Pemberton]

2008/8/10 Russell Miller <duskglow at gmail.com>:
>
>
> 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.

See. Here I disagree a bit. The initial NetworkMaanger in Fc7 screwed
me over at least once, and at the time only supported one network at a
time... this since has been fixed. It has also made using wifi
feasible for me... for that I love it... and I don't consider myself a
newbie... not a guru either, but not a newbie.

> Why is it so difficult to turn pulseaudio off?

No idea, haven't tried.

> Why did NetworkManager keep
> restarting itself after I shut it down - even to the point of *shutting off
> the services*?

I have put it off a few times, never gave me any problems, so I can't
empathize here.

> Why was SElinux introduced in such a halfassed way that my
> default behavior on any new fedora install was to shut it off?

Here I am going to strongly disagree. Even in it's first version of
Fedora it directly saved my ass at least once from a script kiddie.
And right now, it mostly just works on desktops as far as I've seen --
and I wouldn't put a server online without it. While it's arguable
that it was "released" too soon, I don't think it would have seen such
growth it hadn't been put into Fedora. I mean, these days it tells you
how to fix things 90% or more of the time.

I think it would have gotten better if less people had just bitched
and turned it off. I still think turning it off for desktops is a good
idea (for now) however, but again, that will slow down fixing it for
desktops.

> Why was KDE
> 4 introduced when it was not ready for primetime?

Because the KDE SIG team in undermanned, as the ones doing the work,
they got to decide, and their collective decision was to go with 4.0
-- and I respect their descision, we would have no KDE if not for
those guys.

> (I really dislike it, I
> would have rather stuck with 3.5 and had 4.0 as an option

Well in all fairness you did, as did I, you maybe just didn't like the
consequences. My FC7 desktop works just fine and does everything I
need/want. And it's not Windows so I have no fear of bit-rot.

>  - 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!)

Well from what I have been told, this isn't accurate. The KDE SIG team
can give more details on this, but this has been discussed several
times before.

> It seems like I'm being hard on you guys.  OK, I am.

Not me, I'm just trying to "take the hits" for the guys who do the
real work, it's the least a freeloader like myself can do.

> 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.

I think some of this is due to the apperently pressure to make a
bleeding edge distro newbie friendly -- which I see as very
conflicting. Give up Fedoraites the hot stuff that will burn our
tounges as we swallow it, let Redhat have what's left after we've
eaten the bad portions, and have Ubuntu take the spotlight with the
software that has been worked on first in Fedora so that is all nice
and ready when it gets to Ubuntu.

But this is all totally my own opinion, and I do not represent any SIG
or group within the Fedora Project.


-- 
Fedora 7 : sipping some of that moonshine
( www.pembo13.com )