Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Rahul Sundaram]

Christopher Aillon wrote:
> On 12/17/2007 03:24 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Critique
>>
>> "But despite all these positives, the distribution still fails to 
>> attract first-time Linux users
> 
> Really?  I don't think this is true at all.

Even a lot of long time Fedora users don't seem to be thinking of Fedora 
as a newbie friendly distribution though and this is to some extend 
because our focus on the desktop has not been immediately evident.

Most Fedora users still download the DVD where we don't even enable 
NetworkManager yet. We also have sacrificed many features like good 
webcam support (requires third party kernel modules like gspca) in favor 
of upstream focus which is a conscious trade off.

If we are thinking of the next major milestones after the merge of 
Fedora Core and Extras and custom spins, a clearly conveyed focus (IMO 
on the client - desktop, laptops, embedded devices) is what we need.

>  who sometimes complain about the lack of
>> a central configuration utility 

I have heard this as a complaint fairly often and Oracle even recently 
ported Yast from SUSE to RHEL (for "Unbreakable Linux") so there does 
seem to be some demand for it.

> Awesome!  (Seriously.)  Configuration is evil.  With few exceptions, 
> things should "Just Work" without needing configuration.  See 
> NetworkManager, gnome-power-manager, work we're doing with bluetooth, 
> killing off xorg.conf, etc. etc.

You are looking at this from the desktop perspective where you are 
right. Things like Postfix, Apache and Samba are always going to need 
tweaking in various circumstances. As a former sys admin who was 
managing data centers, I don't see configuration requirements just going 
away anytime soon on servers. We can make it easier but 
system-config-httpd doesn't seem to be the answer here. Microsoft 
Management Console goes way beyond that for example.

Rahul