I did it!

Sat Apr 22 22:04:02 UTC 2006

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 10:15 -0400, Debbie Deutsch wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
> >> - which release to use.  Someone who wants the most stable system with
> >> fewest updates today should probably use FC4, not FC5.
> > 
> > Hmm, that depends on what you mean by "fewest updates today."  If you
> > install FC4 today and then perform a system update, you'll be waiting
> > for (IIRC) many hundreds of megabytes of updates to download before
> > you're patched through the present.  On top of that issue, FC4 is at
> > least 6 months closer to being handed off to Fedora Legacy, and after
> > that, EOL.
> 
> To clarify, yes, someone who installed FC4 today would get a large
> number of updates.  However once they were installed there would be
> relatively few, while users of FC5 would be expected to run into more
> bugs and get more updates on a daily basis.

More updates does not necessarily mean more user-visible bugs.  In many
cases the bugs being fixed are of a nature neither insidious nor
particularly troublesome for less technical end-users.

> > Since Fedora's purpose is not just to hand out free software, but to
> > also advance its cause, in most cases, it's a good idea for new people
> > to install the latest and greatest.  That's the distribution getting the
> > most attention for bug fixes, it will last the longest from the day they
> > install it, and their using it (and getting involved in reporting
> > problems) is probably more helpful from the developers' standpoint.
> 
> I must respectfully disagree here.  What is best for Fedora depends on
> the user.  Certainly, an experienced user should be using the newest
> release unless they are trying to do something critical and do not feel
> they can afford to be patient while potential bugs were addressed.  On
> the other hand, someone who is very new to Linux is not going to be very
> skilled at troubleshooting or even describing Linux problems.  So, the
> value of the feedback that such a person can offer to the project will
> generally be less than normal.  Maybe even more important, a novice
> Linux user may be frightened away if he runs into too many bumps in the
> road.  In the long term, the project may be best served if we have more
> people using the "old" release as their first release.  Then, with that
> experience under their belts, they can join the mainstream when the next
> new release comes out.  Bottom line is we would probably have more
> people testing the *next* new release.

I would tend to agree if the user experience were not so much improved
from release to release, or if usability were directly related to the
number of bugs in a release.  Many of the bugs in each release are
subtle and go unnoticed by new users; only a few standouts achieve wide
notoriety from the time of release, and each release has them.  Most are
fixed, some are simply shrugged off until the next release because
development has outpaced them in such a way that fixing them would be
more painful (for developers and users) than waving people on to the
next and better release.

FC5 is probably the most user-friendly releases to date, so I would be
loathe to recommend FC4 in its place, *especially* to a new user.  The
addition of a working GUI update tool, and the easy point-and-click
installation of new myRepo-release packages from the web alone is enough
to recommend FC5 over FC4, not to mention faster OpenOffice.org, a
nautilus Windows network browser that actually works, etc....

> >> - what configurations are the easiest for a beginner.  We all would like
> >> to say that FC is easy to install right out of the box.  It certainly is
> >> for some configurations.  However some features and drivers are more or
> >> less baked than others.  For a novice I would recommend no RAID, 32-bit,
> >> no nVidia drivers.  There's probably a lot more that can be said on this
> >> subject.
> > 
> > As a side note, we wouldn't include anything about nVidia or ATI
> > closed-source 3D drivers anyway.
> 
> We might mention that some vendors have not yet joined the open source
> movement and their drivers are not included with FC because they are
> proprietary.  People should know what to expect.  It may even help them
> choose their hardware accordingly. :-)

This is a great idea.  I asked Sam Folk-Williams to connect with you
about working on this.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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