Fedora's mid-life crisis

Fedora's mid-life crisis

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:57 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: Fedora's mid-life crisis

While I do appreciate hearing the Fedora developers talking and planning on how to improve Fedora... I think some of it is motivated, as were some of the changes in Fedora 7, by envy of Ubuntu's supposed popularity. Now before I get flamed by an Ubuntu fanboi, let me say that Ubuntu is a fine distribution and although I prefer Fedora for personal desktop use, I have actually recommend Ubuntu to some users that I thought it was more appropriate for. Of course I also recommend Fedora too... but yes, Fedora is better for users who have some Linux experience.

I don't mind that Fedora doesn't have a "target" but do think it would benefit if the developers do start up a few more projects (as long as something else doesn't suffer as a result) and put additional focus on improving things in various areas. What areas? I don't really care... as I'm fairly happy with the status quo.

The whole notion that Fedora should drop a desktop or two and focus on one... is silly. Look at Ubuntu... and Kubuntu... and Xubuntu... and all of the rest. People want choice. I run lab machines in an academic environment and if I had to limit my users' choice to one particular destkop environment there would be no end to the bitching and I'd have to change distros... or go outside of the stock distro packages. I don't use Fedora in my labs because I prefer a longer support cycle... but I do use something that inherits from it.

Which users want a desktop where all of the decisions have already been made for them? I'm sure there are some, especially newbies... but looking at my users... I'd guess more than half of them spend a considerable amount of time customizing their desktop environment because they don't want to look like everyone elses.

Asking Fedora to narrow its scope is akin to asking the Linux kernel developers to pick a particular target. It just doesn't work that way. I forget who said it first, but Linux is like a liquid that flows into every crack and space it can find... and I like Fedora because is isn't focused on any particular thing... and does several things well... Jack of many trades... or pick-your-adventure as some of the Fedora developers were saying. Yes, it is a lot of work being so broad.

In a lot of ways, Fedora and Debian are a lot alike... and I'd prefer to see Fedora flowing in more directions until it has as large or larger of a package base as Debian. That might not be as marketing friendly as distro talking points such as "polish" and "integration" or having clearly defined "targets"... but it is a big reason I continue to like Fedora.

I'm so glad so many good distributions exist... because it creates a lot of competition between them... which is so good for the end users.

The Fedora developers should also feel good about the pushing they do to advance new technologies... and new applications... ahead of most everyone else. That is another area where they stand out. Red Hat and Fedora give so much back to the Linux distro pool with their continued support of developers in many major projects and I just don't see that in many other distributions.

The Fedora developers also seem less afraid to take risks by adopting things early and allowing them to be used by the userbase before they are prefect... so the userbase gives more back to the development cycle with real world usage, testing, and bug reporting... leading to faster product maturity. In that they have inherited from the somewhat notorious Red Hat Linux .0 distro releases before the birth of RHEL.

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