Clouds and VPSes

> Fedora will not be allowed to make the required change to prepare RHEL due to the legacy trolls that come crawling out of last century, screaming ME ME ME, MY USECASE, FOREVER!!!! while riding on their roating,rusting, steam powered technology devices demanding that the technology universe remains frozen in time and be supported forever, as is ( another example is Adam trying to deprecate the legacy xorg driver ) as opposed to be thinking a bit further away from their own noses, ahead into the future, to the state that the industry is in now and evolving into.

This paragraph is very interesting because I've long been interpreting the situation exactly the other way. What if those unnecessary changes were only pushed hard by a few vendors who need to force their customers to regularly buy new hardware, and by software developers who see it as a guarantee to get a lifetime job ? I mean, I'm fine with changes that bring improvements, but there are many changes we're forced to swallow that significantly degrade our user experience. Sometimes you're even forced to abandon hardware by lack of support from new software, and for what justification, beyond "look how great the new version is" ?

I used to have machines that took 3 seconds to start to boot from power-on in the past. At work in the lab we have a UEFI machine that takes more than one minute doing whatever in your back before trying to boot, and you have just 2 seconds to decide what device to boot from so you're forced to stay in front counting in your head. That's one of the machines I run test kernels on... It's a good example of crap I don't need and that significantly degrades my experience by preventing me from remotely booting test kernels.

It's not about wanting to stay in the previous century, it's a concrete example of "improvements" that I didn't need and that makes users suffer for no reason except some vendors forcefully pushing that down their customers' throat.

It would be nice if software developers could sometimes try to argument their improvements as benefits perceived by their *users* and not only by themselves as software maintainers. Just claiming that "new feature X is much better and if you don't want to adopt it we'll remove the previous one and you'll have no other choice" isn't exactly how the free software movement started, quite the opposite in fact. I remember the time when we were proud to recycle old machines to make powerful Linux servers. Nowadays some linux distros force you to trash powerful machines. There must be something really wrong with that policy. The only reason I'm thinking about is the distro's policy possibly being dictated by too powerful companies whose business does not benefit from small systems.

But surely I'm wrong on all that line and it's normal to trash perfectly working hardware, I'm the only one concerned about e-waste and with purposely spending my money to buy less pleasant replacement hardware...