Is It Worth Installing F9 Alpha?

[Scott Robbins]

On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 08:54:00PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > John Summerfield wrote:
> > > Robert L Cochran wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > My impression is that there may not be that many testers of Fedora
> > 9. Or at least, fewer people seem to be posting about Fedora 9 bugs.
> > I wonder if momentum for the Fedora distro has slowed a bit? Fedora
> > Core 1 seemed to have many testers...now Fedora 9 seems to have
> > fewer folks out there. But then I may not be very observant.
> 
> 
> today, fedora has gained enough mainstream acceptance that people are
> using it in production and they're just too darned busy running a
> stable shop to mess around with alpha releases anymore.

I think the key word here is busy.  :)  I might run alpha on my laptop
and find a bug--for example, right now, sound does a weird little thing,
the first three or 4 seconds of a song won't play, then it's fine.  If I
stop mplayer or whatever and restart, the second time it's fine. 

Now, for me to report this bug, and for it to be worthwhile, I'd have to
install the alpha on a second machine and see if I can reproduce it.
This was an install off of the live CD.  For me to feel justified
reporting it, I'd also want to install off the DVD and possibly a few
test installs of other live CDs, e.g., KDE and the like. 

So, I don't report this bug, I don't want to waste the time of the
developers, especially when I see that no one else has mentioned it, nor
can I find any mention of it on bugzilla.  I feel as if I would be
wasting their time, especially since I don't have time to test if it is
simply this hardware, the particular liveCD I used, or perhaps a
combination.  

Nor do I post about it here, as this is a busy list, and again, I've
seen no one else mention it.  (I'm simply posting about it now as an
example of a bug that I've experienced, and not reported.)

Maybe it's also a sign of a maturing of the user base.  My completely
subjective impression is that Fedora tends to have more experienced
users, many sysadmins running RH or CentOS on their servers at work,
etc., in other words, people who know that useful bug reporting should
be done right.  The less experienced, who might have used Fedora in the
past, now have other distributions that are more newcomer oriented. 


My impression is really that people are much busier than they used to
be.  Maybe it's the falling economy, maybe we're all just getting older
and tireder.  :)

> 
> in short, maybe it's 'cuz fedora has grown up.  or something like
> that.

Yeah.  What he said.  Far more succinctly than I just did.  :)


-- 
Scott Robbins
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