Christian Schaller cschalle at redhat.com Thu Apr 2 14:19:55 UTC 2015 > I think a lot of these items are things we are already aware of and trying to fix, but of course not all of them are easily fixable, like access to proprietary Windows or MacOS X applications or similar hotkeys/behaviour across UI toolkits. I think we made some great strides in the stability department, but reading the reddit thread did reinforce that it is an area we need to keep focus going forward. > Stability and polish seems challenging with two releases per year, each one with only 13 months of security updates. Conversely on OS X it's one year with software updates, 2-3 years of security updates, and yet new application versions work on at least 2 major OS X versions if not 3 or 4. Fedora churn emphases newness over stability and polish as features. Another is whether a Linux distro, including Fedora, is an OS or just a collection of packages? I see more emphasis on components, rather than how it fits into a whole. Apple has its walled garden in the form of proprietary software, but FOSS puts upstreams into walled gardens of their own, essentially immunized from feature requests let alone anything approaching insistence. In a recent installer password quality thread on the security@ list, mitr writes "All of this just takes a willingness to look at a dozen components at a time instead of at a single one, and a willingness to write patches that sum up to thousand lines instead of a single five-line patch." https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/security/2015-February/002079.html And I'd extrapolate that to the entire OS. Are there generalists with the distro's vision, and political capital to inform and convince upstreams in a cooperative manner? The component specialists really don't seem to have this interest, outside of the desktop environments. I think Fedora should not model itself after, or chase the IDE mentality of Apple or Microsoft. In my view, it isn't really free anyway, just because of a licensing difference. It's only made really free by bridging the already large and widening gap between the application developer and user. The opposite almost happened [1], but those companies abandoned that path. So quite honestly, I'd say, screw these other models of development, all you can hope for replicating them with a different frosting but the substance will still amount to the same thing and for that, why bother? [1] http://thetrendythings.com/read/20042 -- Chris Murphy -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
