Slashdot is discussing "FC3: worthwhile or not ?"

[Timothy Murphy]

On Monday 15 November 2004 16:45, Kim Lux wrote:
> Ouch: "Basically, what I'm saying is I fail to see where FC stands out
> above other distributions that would make me want to use it. Granted,
> after the general buginess I experienced with FC2, I may be biased, but
> the whole point is the fact that I wasn't having similar issues with the
> other distributions, so why should I have to put up with them with FC?"

I guess like many other people, I am running Fedora 
as a "hangover" from Redhat.
I'm pretty happy with Fedora,
and am not sure I've had more problems going from
RH-9 -> FC-1 -> FC-2 -> FC-3
than I had with RH-5 -> ... -> RH-9.

However, I don't have as much confidence that FC-n
will run without problems on machine X as I had with Redhat.
Is that a mistaken view on my part?

I used to give students copies of Redhat,
but I don't think I'd do that any more with Fedora,
although I am asked quite often if I am still distributing "Linux CDs".
Of course it is much easier for people to make their own CDs now anyway.
But I have a feeling that if I gave awqy Fedora CDs
I would be deluged with problems.

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/ .]

It's all very well having a "bleeding edge" system
that  can play all sorts of tricks;
but if you don't get newies using the system
it is going to die out sooner or later.
And newbies are not going to spend much time on a system
that does not work "out of the box".

Incidentally, when I made a similar remark recently
I was told "It's free, what do you expect"
This is a really damaging attitude,
There is absolutely no reason why free software
should not perform as well as any commercial software,
and in my experience the Linux kernel and TeX/LaTeX
are far superior to any of their rivals.

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.
I hope someone will tell me this is nonsense.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland