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Who is Fedora for?Who is Fedora for?Posted Mar 11, 2010 7:24 UTC (Thu) by tux1968 (guest, #58956)Parent article: Who is Fedora for?
Perhaps Fedora just needs to reembrace its original mission of providing leading edge free software to competent enthusiasts instead of worrying about competing with Ubuntu. While Ubuntu has a broader appeal and thus more "market share", Fedora's original mission was important to the overall ecosystem.
For myself, a long time Red Hat and Fedora user, the direction Fedora has been going caused me to jump ship and move to Ubuntu. There has been a long succession of Fedora decisions attempting to compete with Ubuntu at the expense of the original mission. IMHO, Fedora has undermined most of the reasons anyone should even choose it as their distribution of choice. They've just turned themselves into a poor Ubuntu clone.
My hope is that the Fedora project will regain its confidence to be what it originally set out to be -- even if that means it's not the most popular distro.
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Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 16:15 UTC (Thu) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link]
> For myself, a long time Red Hat and Fedora user, the direction Fedora has been going caused me to jump ship and move to Ubuntu. There has been a long succession of Fedora decisions attempting to compete with Ubuntu at the expense of the original mission. IMHO, Fedora has undermined most of the reasons anyone should even choose it as their distribution of choice. They've just turned themselves into a poor Ubuntu clone.
So in your view, you didn't like that Fedora was becoming more like Ubuntu. So you moved to Ubuntu...
Also Fedora itself hasn't made any decisions to compete with or be more like or more dislike Ubuntu. The problem is we've got hundreds of contributors all working towards different un-unified goals. Some may be working towards something more like Ubuntu, but certainly not everyone is, possible not even most are.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:01 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] I think that's missing the point. Ubuntu revs the distribution quickly, providing new software versions every six months. But it does it only in the context of new, named versions. If you choose not to do a dist upgrade, you generally get only bug fixes. Contrast that with fedora pushing Thunderbird 3 (!) mid-stream. Over time, it seems to my eyes Ubuntu has become more conservative with its approach to update management. Fedora seems to be moving more in the direction of "RHEL-Experimental", a product niche that probably doesn't fit well with its users desires, and that is already pretty well served by distributions like Debian unstable and Gentoo.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:41 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Thunderbird 3 schedule was announced and Fedora included a pre-release
version based on the announced schedule and Thunderbird 3 was delivered late but since Fedora had already tested the pre-release, it went along with it and pushed the general release of Thunderbird 3 as an update. Similar things have happened in Ubuntu as well, for example the last LTS release included a pre-release version of Firefox and current release includes a development snapshot of GRUB2. Anyone who thinks Fedora is more experimental than before hasn't been paying attention to some of the earlier releases.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:49 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] I still think you're missing the point. It's not the shipping of "pre- release" versions that people are worried about; as long as things work, most people don't care. It's the pushing of "new" versions (see the examples above -- incompatible UI/interface/dataformat/API changes) inside of a named release (i.e. sucked in automatically via yum update) that is troubling.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:51 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]
And that's what all the discussion has been about.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:02 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Then the example you picked turned out to be not representative of what you
are talking about and yes, a number of discussions have been about avoiding the more troublesome updates.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 21:27 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The differences between the Thunderbird beta and the release were large, confusing people who
were used to the UI and enabling indexing features that many people found excessively resource hungry. While shipping a beta at GA and pushing the full version as an update may be reasonable under various circumstances, it's unreasonable for that update to break people's workflow and the Thunderbird 3 update should have had its defaults modified to match.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Yes and I have written extensively about that including
http://mether.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/stop-screwing-arou...
My point was simply that such behavior can happen in even a minor update
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 16:20 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
Huh? Your comment makes little sense. You say you like the Fedora goals and it is what attracted you to it. But then you say it became a little like Ubuntu which drove you away to what? Ubuntu? Riiiight... that makes sense, NOT. But then again, humans aren't always logical. :)
I can tell you that while Fedora has tried to make the distro easier to use for newbies they definitely have not changed the focus of Fedora strictly to newbies. They try to walk a tight rope of doing lots of different things all at the same time. That seems to be what interests the developers... and that is who you have to keep happy or the users don't even have a chance. Fedora tries to keep a balance between developer and user and I believe it has done a good job. Flames are pretty healthy as long as people don't decide to pack up their stuff and play in a different sandbox.
From my point of view, Fedora hasn't really changed their philosophy much at all. Yes they have increased their marketing and promotion efforts but those are not what is driving Fedora. I too am a long time Red Hat and Fedora user but I do not suffer from Ubuntu envy.
Canonical might be competition for Red Hat but Canonical has to prove they have a workable business plan and from what I've seen, I don't think Red Hat has much to worry about because they really aren't going after the same market segment. I'm glad Canonical is there to keep Red Hat on their toes though as Novell needs help.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:41 UTC (Thu) by tux1968 (guest, #58956) [Link]
[quote]
Huh? Your comment makes little sense. You say you like the Fedora goals and it is what attracted you to it. But then you say it became a little like Ubuntu which drove you away to what? Ubuntu? Riiiight... that makes sense, NOT. But then again, humans aren't always logical. :) [/quote]
Just because you couldn't understand the logic doesn't mean it is missing ;o) To spell it out in simple terms for you: as long as Fedora is going to attempt to be another Ubuntu, and do it badly, I might as well have the real thing. Fedora doesn't do what Ubuntu does very well, despite continuing decisions in that vein. The things that would keep me with Fedora and give up some of the conveniences and polish of Ubuntu, have been cast aside by Fedora in an effort to compete with Ubuntu. Which is sad to me.
Cheers.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:06 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
What specific decisions in your opinion have continued in that vein? I
don't really see that despite being involved in the project ever since its inception. So share your perspectives.
Red Hat Linux and Fedora following that were pioneers of a time based
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 12, 2010 4:16 UTC (Fri) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]
Huh? You give no examples of what Fedora is supposedly doing to be like Ubuntu. AFAIK that is not a goal of Fedora at all. Without specific examples you cannot be very convincing of any point.
Who is Fedora for? Posted Mar 18, 2010 8:31 UTC (Thu) by DYN_DaTa (guest, #34072) [Link]
"Fedora doesn't do what Ubuntu does very well"
You're right. And I'm ***extremly*** glad of it. One likes to take shorcuts and the other tries to innovate. One bring us future and the other bring us cheap goals.
Guess who is who? :).
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