Slashdot is discussing "FC3: worthwhile or not ?"

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 18:49 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> I guess I'm not really convinced that sufficient time and effort
> is devoted by the Fedora team to ironing out installation problems.
> [My view is strengthened by the fact that
> a simple patch to xorg-x11 posted over 6 months ago - not by me -
> has still not been applied,
> although this means that X will not run on my Sony Picturebook,
> and I assume on most other Picturebooks too.
> If you are interested you will find some info on this
> at http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~tim/Picturebook/ .]

Which Bugzilla number is this? The URL only gives a binary RPM and an
xorg.conf, the only info I could draw from that is that the Pictureboook
apparently has a display with 1024x480 pixels ;-).

> I must confess I have this niggling feeling
> that Redhat  may not feel it is in their interest
> for Fedora to be too easy to install and use,
> as this might lesses the attraction of their commercial system.

FC development is fed directly into what becomes the next RHEL release.
Even though FC is not a product to be sold, we try to make it as good as
any RHL release in the past, if only not to run into problems later when
we base a RHEL version on it. What you don't break you don't need to
fix ;-). There are quite some more reasons why we want to make every FC
release the best we can. Granted, there are always some things that fall
short of that goal when we have a time-based development cycle, but from
a user's perspective I'd rather have that than waiting years for a final
release.

> I hope someone will tell me this is nonsense.

Sure it is ("we strive to please" ;-). I have used Red Hat Linux/Fedora
for quite a while and my (obviously biased) opinion is that things have
overall went for the better. It is clear that there isn't a guarantee
that updates/replacements in new versions don't introduce the one or the
other "regression" (real bugs, new tool Y misses feature Z from replaced
tool X, ...) but all in all I'd say that the recent RHL/FC versions have
always been better than their predecessors -- with the occasional brown
paper bag in between. I dare say that we have evolved from the "don't
use .0 releases"-age (granted we don't have .0 releases anymore, but I
think you get my point).

In other words: As I'm the one taking care of the computers at home I
dictate the OS -- the Windows 98 box is used only for the occasional
game or IKEA kitchen planner ;-). As a result from that my wife comes to
me when things are broken and I think the number of complaints has been
decreasing over the time. What more can I ask for?

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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