Hans de Goede wrote:
Why should those that care tell the user how to work around a problem
being created by people who appereantly don't care? And here we have the
real problem, the real problem is not this update this is just an
example the real problem is many Fedora developers seem to be so
arrogant that they don't care about their endusers. Thank you I guess
that is what frustates me the not caring, now can we please start
discussing that which IMHO is the real issue and stop discussing the
example.
FWIW and even though it's probably not the best example in the world.
Large proprietary corporations sometimes update stuff even though it
means that a few thousand+ users will end up with a broken system. Our
friends in Redmond are but one example. And those guys aren't even that
biased towards technical improvement vs user friendliness.
The point is that Fedora has a dedicated mission to provide a completely
free OS. Because of this and a number of other things, we cannot wait
for binary-only, non-free driver vendors to catch up all the time. This
has been said several times before.
If we actually chose to wait for Nvidia/ATI (as an example), what other
stuff do we need to wait for next? Perhaps a security problem in the
kernel breaks certain binary-only network drivers? perhaps a bug release
of glibc has the possibility of causing instabilities in a proprietary
database engine? It's just not possible to predict, prevent and/or
regard all of the problems that MAY arise because of unsupported stuff -
That's why it's unsupported in the first place. And there are certainly
no reason why such unsupported components should prolong the adaption of
improved components for the rest of the userbase.
I'm firmly of the belief that Fedora should NOT wait for anything like
this. Problems like these are best regarded by the 3rd party repos like
livna or atrpms. However, I can understand the unfortunate problem for
users who depend on the binary drivers too. My thought is that if an
update causing problems for a non-free, binary-only driver is not
acceptable (it's acceptable for me and the proprietary drivers I have to
deal with on certain Fedora machines), then they should probably choose
a different platform for those systems (I have lots of RHEL systems too
because of support issues with proprietary stuff too). There are several
free and non-free projects that will be more ABI stable than Fedora (And
there are free RHEL-like distros to choose from as well). But a lot of
us LIKE this characteristic about Fedora. Actually all the catering to
binary and non-free stuff are some of the things that keep me away from
other distros for certain types of machines. I suspect a few other
Fedora users feel the same way about this.
Again - It has absolutely nothing to do with deliberately breaking stuff
for anyone. I don't think most of the replies in this discussion has
been mean or arrogant. But some updates will benefit a lot of users who
have NOT chosen to rely on a binary-only driver that the Fedora
community or any other open community have no possible way to support
and so this is the way it essentially has to be.
If anything in the above sounds arrogant in any way, it's unintended.
/Thomas