Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 16, 2012 17:23 UTC (Mon) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Left by Rawhide by louie
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

louie, So given your dismal opinion of Fedora / Rawhide, what have you moved on to? What distro is the most stable? ...staying somewhat bleeding edge for desktop stuff? ...doing a lot of original development work on many small and some major packages? I'm guessing the answer is different for each question but maybe not.

Fedora definitely isn't for everyone but I prefer it and refer to it as the "innovator distro". We all have our preferences and that is one reason I'm glad so many distros exist.

People sometimes freak out about the number of Linux distros but I ask them why aren't there multiple flavors of Windows and Mac available... besides the few releases provided by their makers? The answer is obvious, because they don't allow third parties to remix and release like Linux does... but you have to wonder just how many Windows there would be and how many Mac OS X's there would be if people were allowed to remix it. My guess is that they would have the same "problem" we do if only they were allowing it.

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Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 16, 2012 21:17 UTC (Mon) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

I still use Fedora (not Rawhide, which I would prefer to use). Fedora itself is a perfectly competent distro, with both practical and moral aims that work for me. I just think that treating Rawhide as a dumping ground squanders an opportunity to much better achieve those practical/pragmatic aims.

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 18, 2012 3:32 UTC (Wed) by AngryChris (subscriber, #74783) [Link]

This is where i'm at right now. I swap between Debian and Fedora every couple of years. What amazes me is how good Fedora is when it appears (to me) to be so grossly mismanaged. I don't see how Rawhide can be remotely useful for "seeing how things work together" if no one is running it (i.e.; making those things work together). As recently as last year, the policy board mailing list was overrun with talk of mission statements. It's like watching Initech (Office Space) actually publishing great software.

I have a feeling that most good Free software is good in spite of how the project is run rather than because of it (for any given Free software project).

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 17, 2012 9:12 UTC (Tue) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]

> People sometimes freak out about the number of Linux distros but I ask
> them why aren't there multiple flavors of Windows and Mac available...
> besides the few releases provided by their makers? The answer is obvious,
> because they don't allow third parties to remix and release like Linux
> does... but you have to wonder just how many Windows there would be and
> how many Mac OS X's there would be if people were allowed to remix it. My
> guess is that they would have the same "problem" we do if only they were
> allowing it.

There are already nearly endless amounts of custom Windows installer cd images, with different sets of updates and additional drivers added. Distributing those is of course illegal, but since there is a need (there is plenty of hardware where the standard images wont even boot, many manufacturers no longer provide install disks and even if they did most users lose those within the first week of ownership) there is a service.