Hi, I use Fedora rawhide daily as an all-purpose desktop: administrative tasks (budgets, taxes, etc), mail, web browsing (online stores, news, etc). I am pretty agnostic in what I call desktop but over the years I've slowly moved from fat clients to local web clients plugged on local 'server' apps (postfix, amavisd-new, dovecot, squirrelmail…). In part to get the ability to access my desktop remotely and in part due to GNOME's long-term failure in providing apps with stable behaviour, complete feature-sets and robust data handling (I used for example to launch evolution when at home. Now I don't bother and open squirrelmail directly. Both evo and thundermail never bothered with correct handling of shared maildir stores). I don't care about the continuous chrome rewrites and experimentations when basic functionnality does not work (for the same reasons I use the terminal all the time instead of desktop helpers). The web apps have no fancy UI but they get the job done reliably day after day. (OTOH OpenOffice then LibreOffice I continue to use, so I'm not wed to web apps I just want working no-surprise dekstop apps). IMHO there is a severe lack of understanding FLOSS desktop-side that pretty demos win reviews and two-weeks user tests but long-term adoption relies on long-term stability and lack of UI surprises. Once upon a time I wanted to explore adding entertainment media PC functions to the desktop (I have all the required hardware, including video capture card) but I gave up on it for pretty much the same reasons I gave up on GNOME apps (the last straw was the killing of background audio/video tasks by laptop-oriented developpers). Printing robustness is a long-term sore point (when you fill admin documents, invoices, taxes it must work now not the next day after lots of debuging). Due to limited free time my Fedora testing has slowly devolved into filling abrt and selinux reports (there are enough crashes in Fedora apps handling them does not leave any time for more in-depth reporting, which is ignored too often anyway). I've used Fedora and other FLOSS projects in the past to push changes i wanted upstream, and I still use it to get an idea about the changes that will eventually land in distro derivatives that I will see used at work for example (I'm pretty pessimistic about Fedora adoption. RHL then Fedora used to be in the same class than other desktop systems like windows, but other desktop producers made huge stability efforts while Fedora moved the other way for unfathomable reasons. Once upon a time a Linux desktop was the solution if you wanted to avoid data loss (at the cost of being a bit bare) now it's even more bare but completely outclassed by the competition on the stability front. Lately I've noticed the Games SIG packaged some interesting bits in Fedora, and so far those bits to not fail in strange and misterious ways and I can continue months-old games after multiple updates without strange and mysterious time-consuming behaviour changes. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
