Looking forward to Fedora 7 [LWN.net]

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:52 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533)
In reply to: Looking forward to Fedora 7 by pointwood
Parent article: Looking forward to Fedora 7

But not everyone wants to support Novell by contributing to OpenSUSE, and
there's growing concern about the gap between what the Ubuntu developers
say and what they do on matters like Freedom. A distribution with the
principles of Fedora backed by the development resources of RedHat is a
very attractive proposition; if only they can fix the second class status
of KDE.

to post comments

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 11:24 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] (3 responses)

That is of course true.

I'm not personally that concerned about Ubuntu in regards to freedom. They seem to have a practical approach to things, similar to Linus Torvalds and I really like that. I'm not saying that I like binary drivers - not at all, my own laptop was bought with Intel graphics specifically because I try to avoid closed source drivers as much as possible.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 13:39 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

well, yes, Ubuntu has a more practical, linus-like approach to Free
Software, as opposed to Red Hat/Fedora which is much more strict. i think
it's good there is a choice, as some ppl respect and prefer the Red-Hat
way of dealing with the problems - as opposed to hiding them from the user
by workarounds like automatic non-free codec download or even including
proprietary software.

and as KDE user, i'd love to see Fedora have a decent KDE, as it is really
quite terrible now...

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 14:04 UTC (Thu) by jprenaud (guest, #24040) [Link]

Honestly, it is not that bad if you use the kde-redhat repository maintained by Rex Dieter. I came from Kubuntu on a laptop to FC6 on a desktop system with KDE chosen as the desktop at install and although Kubuntu offer all the system tools with QT widgets, the KDE desktop on Fedora works well for me.

Please voice your issues about the current state of the KDE desktop in FC6 + kde-redhat repo so that they have a chance to be considered for Fedora 7.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 14:15 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Certainly - choice is great, it's one of the great things about open source software :)

"...as opposed to hiding them from the user by workarounds like automatic non-free codec download or even including proprietary software."

I don't think Ubuntu does that and from what I've read, they don't intend to do it that way either.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 12, 2007 1:22 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

You know, making KDE a "first class citizen" in Fedora-land is in your hands: Get in touch with the people working towards "Fedora KDE", and chip in.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 12, 2007 8:35 UTC (Fri) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

I don't use Fedora, so I don't see why I should start working on making KDE better there?

Yes, I'm fully aware that the people doing this is doing it for free and if I want something, I should just make it happen myself, but I'm a bit tired of that comment because that is just not an option in many cases.
I do regularly donate to various projects to support the developers, but that's not my point. The problem is that when people get that comment thrown in their face everytime they comment on a piece of open source software, they get tired of it too and the result is that they get a bad experience with open source software.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 13, 2007 13:28 UTC (Sat) by tlw (guest, #31237) [Link]

> You know, making KDE a "first class citizen" in
> Fedora-land is in your hands

Agreed, and very well said.

As it turns out my window environment of choice happens to be fvwm2, which RedHat/Fedora stopped providing RPMs for many releases ago. Did that make me stop using RedHat/Fedora and seek out another distro that provided it for me? Or did it make me whine in public? No. Getting fvwm2 is a simple matter of downloading, configuring, compiling, and installing the program from source. What's that?... 4 steps instead of 1?

Honestly I can't believe how some people have become so helpless. If someone doesn't provide an icon to click on, it doesn't get done. When I hear people complaining about this it almost makes me think there are no free compilers available anymore.

Maybe in the 1990's or early 2000's compiling source code was a bit of an art and almost required someone to be a developer to get it to work... but nowadays? And especially something like fvwm2 (or KDE for that matter).

Ahh... the good ol' days... when compiling from source was considered fun and almost a requirement... :-)