Flatpaks for Fedora 27

Posted Jul 28, 2017 13:34 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Flatpaks for Fedora 27 by mjthayer
Parent article: Flatpaks for Fedora 27

You're definitely being naïve here. Microsoft's experience with Windows was that 85% of Windows XP blue screen crashes could be definitively traced to buggy third party code; 30% of Windows Vista crashes traced to a single vendor's device drivers. And yet, who got the blame for Windows being crashy? The device makers? No, Microsoft.

The same sort of thing will happen if a Fedora upgrade breaks your installed software - the last thing you did was update Fedora, and now VirtualBox fails. Here, not only is it obvious that things have stopped working, but the proximate cause is obvious - "I updated Fedora and now my apps don't work!" - and thus Fedora gets the blame and has to shunt things onto you.

Flatpaks for Fedora 27

Posted Jul 28, 2017 14:53 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

Your conclusion may still be right, but I don't think that the example is quite comparable. A comparable situation to a blue screen on Windows would be a kernel panic in Fedora, which is a far cry from VirtualBox refusing to start with a message about driver not loaded. Particularly as VirtualBox is third-party software in an environment where third-party is a second-class citizen, so to speak, and automatically treated as less reliable, particularly in regard to system integration. (Not that integration is any harder than on Windows or OS X, where we do not have the second-class status - if anything it is the other way round.)

My version of your blue screen example would be when VirtualBox multi-monitor full-screen handling was not working on Ubuntu. It was a simple mistake in the Unity code, a function being called with (x1, y1, x2, y2) instead of (x, y, w, h) or vice versa, and no one else used that particular EWMH functionality, so it was our risk so to speak. So users reasonably assumed it was our bug, and as a result I spent quite a lot of time getting a one-line fix into Unity. Whatever, on a closed operating system we would have had to live with it.