I'll say it again: Fedora Core is beta-quality at best

Posted Nov 25, 2006 23:39 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: I'll say it again: Fedora Core is beta-quality at best by jonth
Parent article: Notes from the leading edge

The sort of thing our editor is seeing is pre-alpha quality

We can't say that. It may well be a bug that is exposed only with a certain combination of environmental factors that don't exist on the developer's system, or even any alpha test system. Beta test is the appropriate way to find out about those things.

It appears to me that it's customary in the open source world to do beta testing where proprietary software developers would normally use alpha testing instead. Sun would spend a lot of money testing Solaris before any user gets access to it, and the users would ultimately pay for that testing in money. You really have to have money to do alpha testing, because it is boring and people do not volunteer for it. So an open source project instead skips the alpha testing and puts the code out for people to try. Consequently, open source beta test code has plenty of bugs compared to proprietary beta test code.

(Clarifying some terminology: alpha testing is simulating use of a product for the sole purpose of finding bugs; beta testing is using a product to do real work, with the immediate goal of getting a job done and a side goal of finding bugs).

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I'll say it again: Fedora Core is beta-quality at best

Posted Nov 27, 2006 15:16 UTC (Mon) by jonth (guest, #4008) [Link]

Sorry, I don't buy that - there's an existence proof that we can do better than Fedora-rawhide and that is Debian-unstable.

I can just about buy the idea that Fedora-rawhide is the equivalent of Debian-experimental, but if that's the case, where's Fedora's equivalent of unstable or testing? There doesn't appear to be one. How Fedora approaches stability I really don't know - which lines up with my experiences of Fedora core 3 and 4 at work, where we had a huge number of stability and consistency problems on laptops (Vaios and Thinkpads). As a result of this, we've voted with our feet and moved all our laptops over to Ubuntu (Dapper), with an instant, noticeable improvement in stability.