On 16.6.2020 12:21, Kamil Paral wrote:
I'd like Fedora systems to be transparent and honest. If some packages
need to be removed, tell me about it, and ideally also tell me why
(e.g. no longer maintained). If possible, tell me how to avoid it
temporarily (it might be months or years, but unmaintained software
will break one day unexpectedly), but be clear about the consequences.
For general users, this information might involve just "important"
packages (not libraries etc) - we don't do this well at present.
This approach beats "never ever removing anything, at any cost", at
least for me.
I whole heartedly agree with your take on this but Kevin concerns are valid.
Based on my experience pushing Fedora as an Fedora ambassador to novice
end users ( subsequently having to install/setup/and support their
installation as a result of that ), it was enough for the desktop team
to rearrange locations of apps in menus to scare novice end users away
from *using* Linux ( yes not just Fedora but Linux altogether ) and them
wanting to use windows or os-x again, something that they were
*familiar* with and did not constantly keep changing ( which is why
Microsoft had to reluctantly keep the old look and feel of Windows ) And
I know first hand that the Gnome community in Fedora has never gotten
this right because seemingly trivial changes like tidying up menu's are
huge changes to the novice end users that operate on familiar look and
"click here" memory.
To me this is a question of what is Fedora target audience.
It cant be novice end users since those cant install Fedora and afaik
people cant buy hw with Fedora pre-installed and even if that option was
available for the novice end users you would have to be a pretty good
sales person to convince them to abandon something they are familiar
with ( talking from a first hand experience doing exactly that ) as in
windows or os-x. ( Arguably there always has been and still is the
underlying expectation that Fedora users are atleast somewhat familiar
with Linux and RHEL, basically RHEL administrators I would say )
This is also a question of what constitutes as an "unmaintained
software" in the distribution. Is it dead upstream, is it awol package
maintainer, is it poorly maintained packages like the maintainer that
only appears when there is a pending RHEL release then disappears, is it
not responding to bugs filed against his or her component etc.
But the act of removing an unmaintained application/package in the
distribution wont scare people away from using Fedora no more than (
even trivial by every count ) changes that the Gnome community has
historically done in the distribution thus a less of an issue that Kevin
makes it out to be and leaving something installed on end users system
can do more harm than good I would say.
Presumably this is also less of an issue as end users stop installing
application from the distribution but instead do so with flatpaks and at
one point application will no longer be provided in the distribution (
you have to install it from flatpak marketplace).
Just my 2 cents.
JBG
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
