Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 17, 2016 14:18 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
Parent article: Modularizing Fedora

I think the user story is "simple": I want the latest Firefox, but I also want that 10 years old window manager (the last version before upstream broke "focus follows mouse"). I want the bugfixes from the latest kernel but do not want new audio plumbing. I don't want to upgrade X (the current config and binary blob works, do not touch it). LibreOffice can open and edit all of my documents, so I don't need new versions of that either. I don't care what process runs as pid 1, but do not change it in order to fix something I'm not using (I don't trust anyone not to break something that I do use). I have an UTP cable coming out of the back of my computer so I don't want to see anything related to WiFi. It's a desktop machine so I don't need a battery icon.

This is a wishlist from a user, not from a tester or "community member" or a freedom-activist. I'm not sure the distributions are capable to achieve it though.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 17, 2016 14:50 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> This is a wishlist from a user, not from a tester or "community member" or a freedom-activist. I'm not sure the distributions are capable to achieve it though.

BTW, you left out "I don't want to pay anything for any of this."

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 17, 2016 15:33 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

Of course. After all, I don't get any warranty.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 17, 2016 15:51 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That was shorthand for “I want other people to work for free on my personal behalf to figure out exactly what it is that I want, to implement, test, debug, and document it, and to keep it available and working just like I wanted it, for eternity.”

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 17, 2016 18:46 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Your wishlist basically amounts to a warranty.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 19, 2016 14:25 UTC (Sat) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (1 responses)

Paying for software rarely gets you a warrantee.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 19, 2016 20:09 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

s/rarely/never

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 18, 2016 14:13 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, exactly. Although your caricature is a bit extreme, this is really what everyone asks from operating systems — with the key point being that everyone's idea of what they want to change quickly, what they want to stay stable, and what they don't care about is completely different.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 18, 2016 14:53 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> everyone's idea of what they want to change quickly, what they want to stay stable, and what they don't care about is completely different

This kind of leads to the idea of containerization of applications with all their dependancies, either with the App model (xdg-app, Android .APK, iOS .app, etc.) or automated virtualization of the entire OS like https://lwn.net/Articles/610067/ so you can mix and match software, at the cost of disk space for all the differing dependancies, without expecting OS distributions to maintain infinite versions forever of every component.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 18, 2016 16:25 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It sounds like that user wishes they weren't using Fedora. Gentoo already provides everything in that list (except stale LibreOffice versions), I'm sure quite a few others do too.

Modularizing Fedora

Posted Mar 23, 2016 18:22 UTC (Wed) by dmoulding (subscriber, #95171) [Link]

Translation: "I want Gentoo, I just don't know it yet."