On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:04:23 -0500, you wrote: >From what I have talked with in the past.. 3 years is their bare >minimum and 7 is their what we really want. It usually takes the >vendor about 3-6 months of work to make sure the OS works on their >hardware without major problems and then they want people to buy >support contracts for 3-5 years where the number of problems needed in >year 3-5 are none. [This means that they want to have Fedora N for 3-6 >months before their laptops ship with it. So you ship them a frozen >preload before you release to public. They also want any shipped to >'last' for the warranty cycle because trying to deal with update >questions when N eol's in the middle costs them a lot.] I think this is the key that needs to be thought out before figuring out if / how Fedora can meet that need. Does this mean they need / want a new Fedora LTS every year, 2 years, 3 years? If they want 3 to 5 years of support, and the hardware is released 2 years in to a LTS release, does that extend it to a 7 year LTS? Is that really a viable Linux desktop market given how the desktops currently develop? Perhaps this is a discussion that needs to be expanded from just Fedora to also include KDE and Gnome? >This matches the majority of laptop buyers whether they are developers >or home users. They cycle a laptop 4 to 5 years with 7-8 looking to be >the new average. They also don't update their OS unless it does it >auto-magically for them. This is where the majority of profits for >laptop sales come from so the manufacturers aim to please this segment >most. There isn't a large margin on laptop sales anymore I suspect the big problem is that it requires a total rethink of what a distribution is and how it is created. Because if you look at Windows, which is what this idea is really talking about, yes the users are quite happy to never upgrade the OS but that is to a large extent based on the fact that 3 or 4 years after purchase they can still go and buy/download the latest application and it will install and run. That concept doesn't work very well currently with the lock step march of an entire distro (which is essentially the OS and applications) to newer, incompatible versions every 6 months. Really, to support what the hardware vendors really want (even if they aren't clearly saying it) involves moving anything non-core-os away from the current packaging system (so for Fedora RPMS) and to some sort of container that will work regardless of what the underlying system is providing. You have to be able to at the very least keep updating Firefox (as a prime example) for that 5 years without forcing the upgrade of half the os in the process. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
