Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 04:19:05PM +0100, lee wrote: >> > Because really, even though many people think the base OS is now >> > boring, it’s far from done, and there is a lot of innovation going on >> > at that level as well. >> What do you consider as "base OS"? > > It's somewhat nebulous, but, as a general working definition, the system > stuff below the applications layer. (Not in the OSI sense.) Are there significant differences in that with different Linux distributions? >> And on top of that, what is the Fedora-way of replacing gnome --- which >> I find totally useless --- with fvwm, which perfectly does what I want? > > It sounds like you want to do a minimal install and then add up from that. Yes, that`s what I always did with Debian. > I think you will benefit from this effort in that the minimal install will > be better defined and curated. That would be nice --- I wouldn`t even have thought that there is one if I hadn`t read on this list that there is one, somewhere. I still don`t know how I would start with a minimal install, though. When you get the installer and boot it, you get a working system. That`s a good way to go because otherwise you need a second computer around when installing to look up things. But where is the minimal install, and what when you don`t get a GUI? >> It`s only one example, and you can figure out how to do it. But the >> point with this is that Fedora lacks flexibility. You get what you get >> and then have to go through a lengthy process of getting rid of stuff >> and of somehow getting to work what you need, like fvwm. > > Sure, I would agree that this isn't a strong suit, particularly with the > all-or-nothing way RPM dependencies currently work. Yes, that is one of the things I don`t like. It forces you to install stuff you never need. > But on the other hand, I'm not sold on it being a huge problem. If you > know what you are doing, it's not that big of a burden, and I'm pretty > sure that the intersection of people who want this and people for whom > it is easy with Fedora as it stands is quite large. Well, look around at what ppl say about different distributions like you would in order to decide which one to use. What you find out is primarily what "desktop environment" and, in a side note, what kind of package management they are using. I still have no use for what`s called a "desktop environment". They slow down my computer with all kinds of stuff I don`t need and, more importantly, get majorly into my way. Try out several, and you find that when you get set up in one, you have to start over to get what you need when you try out another one. Not even the keyboard is working right because your ~/.Xmodmap is being ignored. Yet what "desktop environment" is the default seems to have become the most important feature of a Linux distribution. Otherwise it might be mentioned in a side note, if at all, and important things would be pointed out instead. Having choices is one of the most important things. You still have them with Fedora --- otherwise I wouldn`t be using it. That kinda makes it relevant how easy or difficult it is to get what you want. The point is that you need to know what you`re doing, i. e. how to get the choices. Why not make it easy for people to choose? >> On a side note: The installer sucks, just try to do one of the most >> basic and important things with it: Partitioning. > > Saying something "sucks" isn't very helpful. Not only is it needlessly > negative, it is intangible. Name a real problem and we can talk about it. There have been a few threads about it on this list. The major problem is partitioning. The last time I used the installer, it was the one F19 comes with. It was impossible to get the partitioning I wanted, so I had to partition otherwise. Then it was nearly impossible to make the installer actually use the partitions the way I wanted. And since the buttons the installer uses are weird and misleading, you never really know what you`re doing. I had to try over and over again to figure out how to somehow make it use the existing partitions. If I had used it on a computer that had data on the disks I wanted to keep, I`d have had to physically unplug them to make sure the data doesn`t get lost --- and that isn`t always possible. So some simple partitioning that would be done with the Debian installer within ten minutes took three hours. The Fedora installer does what it want`s, not what the user wants, and it leaves the user in the dark about what is actually going to happen. On top of that, it doesn`t offer any choices. You cannot pick any package at all. Take a look at the Debian installer. I never used their graphical one --- an installer shouldn`t require a GUI; a GUI is just annoying for that. It`s been a while since I used it, but it`s worlds ahead of the installer Fedora has. It`s not perfect, either, though. > On the specific you do give, I'm pretty confident in saying that you're > actually wrong. Unless the installer majorly changed from F19 to F20, I`m not wrong. > Storage is hard, and the new anaconda contains the most > sophisticated and powerful GUI partitioning tool ever made. Seriously? And like I said, I don`t like GUI installers at all. A GUI may work or not. I`ve seen them not working too much to rely on them, especially not when installing an OS. > It's just a really difficult area to get perfect. It`s very simple, actually. You only need to give the user the possibility to use and to create partitions the way they want. You also need to be perfectly clear --- and this shouldn`t even need to be mentioned --- about what will happen to the partitions. > Expect this to continue to improve with each Fedora release as the > design is refined and bugs are shaken out. Hopefully so ... I found the installer of F17 much better in that point, even though it didn`t let me use a separate partition for /usr. >> And when you managed that, you can`t start with a minimal install and >> install just what you need. > > You can start with a pretty basic install in the GUI. How? You get an icon you click on and from there on, you nowhere see that choice. > If you need more than that, you really should be looking at kickstart, > and maybe even producing your own spin. Why does it need to be a spin? Why can`t we have choices? >> > I was at a large cloud conference a while ago, and almost nobody was >> > using Fedora, and so I asked people why they chose the distribution >> > they are building their stuff on, and why they didn’t choose >> > Fedora. Almost universally, the response wasn’t “What I am using is >> > great!” — it was “Oh, I don’t care. I just picked this, and that’s >> > what I’m using and it’s fine.” >> I`m not one of these people. Thinking like that, they don`t need a >> Linux distribution; they can as well use Windoze or Macos. > > Yet these people were absolutely running Linux. Just not ours. Hm. Maybe that`s how people are. Think of other things they use: How many times do they pick something because it`s great? It involves more work to do that because you need to find out what is available, what the differences are and what makes something great for you in particular. So they don`t bother and use something which is fine. Look at http://fedoraproject.org/ --- it says this and that and doesn`t say or show that Fedora is great or awesome and why. >> One thing Fedora shines with (so far) is reliability, and reliability is >> one of the requirements I have. I have been using Debian for almost >> twenty years until they messed up badly with their brokenarch. Doing >> that put Debian out of the question once and for all because they failed >> that requirement miserably beyond believe. >> Please do not make the same mistake with Fedora. Switching to another >> distribution is a painful process. > > I don't know what that specific problem was with Debian, but we are > certainly working at increasing reliability, particularly through automated > testing. It wasn`t something slipping through quality control, it was their decision. They removed crucial libraries that were working fine for years and left people stranded. There was no fix or replacement for it, no documentation to figure something out. I got a few suggestions to install other packages instead, and none of them worked. The libraries were just gone, and you suddenly couldn`t run the software you used to run anymore. Letting users down like that is a big mistake. There was no choice but to switch, not only because the software didn`t run anymore: It clearly shows that the makers of the distribution don`t care, and once they start doing things like that, it is foreseeable that there will be more trouble in the future. There can always be a bug somewhere that has gone unnoticed. They are likely to be found and to get fixed --- usually no big deal. Some are or can not be fixed, or it takes long before they get fixed, and you may have to find another solution. Unless there are too many bugs, it`s not a problem for a distribution. Fedora already does a good job with it. But when the makers of a distribution turn their backs on the users like Debian did, you have to replace that distribution with something else. >> But I find the reliability I`ve seen so far with Fedora very exciting >> and I am very thankful for it. It is a great accomplishment of Fedora. > > As I started with: Fedora is awesome.:) :) Add more choices, and it will be more awesome :) >> > Also: the base OS has developed to the point where it has become >> > uninteresting. >> Perhaps not: It is possible that the expectations have >> changed. >> Ten years ago people were probably much more willing to accept that >> their soft- or hardware doesn`t work and that their computer crashes or >> freezes every now and then than they are willing to accept this >> nowadays. Some people still don`t care. > > Actually, the change is the opposite, at least in the context I am talking > about. Check this out: > https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/how-netflix-embraces-failure-improve-resilience-maximize-availability Hm, IIUC, the idea is to figure out when/how/why something fails in order to make it so that it doesn`t fail anymore. That`s not really new? The people you have been asking why they aren`t using Fedora probably were not people using Linux for the purpose of testing Linux distributions. They were probably people who found something that works. For Linux distributions, "great" and "awesome" are the default. People who are looking for something that works pick a distribution and it`s fine because it meets their expectations because it works. That makes it appear as if it has become irrelevant which particular distribution they picked. It`s a recipe for failure because not all distributions work evenly well. People are not aware of that until they experience the failure. Ten years ago, what to pick may have appeared more important because people experienced and thus expected more failures. That made them think more about what to pick, which made it appear more relevant which distribution that would be. I didn`t pick Fedora because I expected greater reliability, but for other reasons. Now that I`m experiencing this greater reliability, it is a very strong point that speaks for Fedora. I used to put Debian on servers. Now I`d put RHEL or Centos instead just because of that and because Fedoras pace can be scaringly fast. And if I had known that Fedora works so much better than Debian, I might have switched long ago. The problem is that you don`t find out these things when you want to pick a distribution. You just have to pick one. >> and to make that easy, I`d like to make a package". Then you try to >> find out how to do that and that`s where it ends: It`s just too >> difficult. >> Instead, you put your software on github. > > Absolutely. We need to make that easier. How about some documentation and a mailing list for it? Somehow, the people making a distribution --- and those are the ones who make packages, I guess --- seem awfully far away from the users. >> That decision came across as "removing an MTA from the default >> install". I don`t know if you`re saying that something is now replacing >> sendmail or that there is no MTA when you do a default install. >> If it`s the latter, no MTA at all, then it was a very bad decision. A >> system without MTA is not functional. > > Sure it is. It is not without a replacement. There`s lots of software sending you stuff by email. > Again, hyperbole doesn't really help. In fact, in many situations, an > MTA doesn't do you any good, as your network won't allow it to do > anything useful remotely (true now at most big companies and on most > big ISPs) It doesn`t have to do anything not local to be required. > and local delivery goes into the black hole of root's mailbox > unless you configure it. Mail disappearing without notice is unacceptable. If Fedora has such a configuration with a default install, then that needs to be fixed. > And if you're going to configure one, installing one isn't a > significant extra step. Plus, since there are multiple different MTAs, > this is back to your choice of fvwm vs. gnome -- if we have a default > you don't want, you're going have to remove it to put in your choice. It`s perfectly fine not to install an MTA when there is a replacement that handles the local mail. Without a replacement, you don`t have a working system until you install an MTA. >> > So that’s part of what Fedora.next is: to look at our mission and >> > decide what more we need to do to make it happen. >> Let me simply ask what "community" is supposed to mean in the mission >> statement (which I can`t quote here because it`s an image). > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#Our_Mission > > "The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open > source software and content as a collaborative community." > >> I am asking this because nowadays, everything is a "community", to the >> point where that word doesn`t mean anything anymore. What, who and >> where is this "community" in this case, who are the members of it and >> how does one become a member? > > "Collaborative community". That means it is all the people who work together > on the project. You can become a member by saying you are and doing > something. So I was right to think that being collaborative is substantial and constituting for "community" in this case. I forgot about "leading", though. And you could say that there are some people who want to work together to lead the advancement of FOSS. Why not just say that? Things can be said simply when you understand them, and when something cannot be said simply, you have an indication that it cannot be understood. Anyway, thinking of it, I`m finding the aspect of "leadership of advancement" quite remarkable. How is that to be accomplished? > That's all there is to it. (Although, practically speaking, you > will also want a Fedora account if you don't have one.) See > <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join> for a lot more starting material. Thank you, I`ll look into it. >> Listen to the users, if you want to make a better distribution. > > Sure. Continue speaking up -- we are listening. Good :) >> > Maybe we could do a better job by letting people put their packages in >> Assuming that they can make packages ... > > Excellent point. Not requiring packages is the next level. Hm, I thought you`d say something like that. Someone still needs to make them, though. >> I think I`d like to see an article with questions like this which lays >> out what answers to these questions are currently in place. There >> probably aren`t very many people who know the current answers. Such an >> article would also need to explain for each question why it is necessary >> to ask it now. > > I'll think about it. :) I`ll read it when you write one :) -- Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug) -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? 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