I wanted to point out another view on this topic, from a technical user
who uses not only Fedora but other Linux distros. She messaged me
off-list and asked me to present her point-of-view, and my summary of
that is what follows:
- She has been using Linux for over 11 years and works on a security
product that involves securing multiple Linux distributions - SuSE,
Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, etc.
- Fedora had been the favored Linux distro for both her and many of her
prominent customers, including well-known government and military
agencies. Up until FC6. Over the past two years, distros such as CentOS,
SuSe, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux are showing greater
stability and thus customer interest has shifted away from Fedora.
- Fedora "was cutting edge, yet reasonably stable and easy to use." Now
it is too unstable. Some complaints about recent Fedora releases she has
heard from clients, "antagonistic upgrades and an increasing lack of
stability."
- The clients she refers to are highly-technical users, running advanced
scientific projects and in some cases military operations. They're not
highly technical in terms of being intimately familiar with the inner
workings of Linux, they're highly technical in their domains which are
complex. They have PhDs in meterology or advanced medical and
aeronautics degrees. And they want the distro they work with to just
work - they can't deal with the instability we've introduced over the
past two years and have started going elsewhere. The suggestion
elsewhere in the thread that one should be required to have a 'drivers
license' to run a distro she related to requiring a kernel hacker to
interpret the results of a medical exam - a highly technical person just
not in their field of expertise.
One particular quote she gave me that I'd like to share:
"Fedora boasts of an "innovation" target audience but is falling down in
the two areas real world (excepting perhaps games and CGI)
high-innovation users demand: stable upgrades and consistent usability.
I believe if your group can wrestle these back under control the distro
numbers would increase dramatically."
In summary, having technical users as a target isn't a good excuse for
instability and complexity.
~m
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