Re: Fedora's Userfiendliness (was Re: Leaving?)
On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 10:50 +0200, Terje Bless wrote:
Chris Chabot <chabotc(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:
>http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/editorial_13
That editorial, without further context, has net negative information content.
You can basically sum it up as "Ubuntu RuleZ! Red Hat Sux0rs!"; it's a
pure
Appeal to Emotion, which I guess is why you say it relates to "the feelings that
some people have been feeling." You might as well quote song lyrics or a poem.
It's about winning hearts and minds though. Articles like that one
convey no useful information whatsoever - but it's an editorial so it's
going to have a bias behind it - except perhaps for the fact that there
are a lot of people who are very excited about Ubuntu. I'll bet a lot of
those same people were very excited about Red Hat Linux back in the day.
I used to use Ubuntu and Debian a lot more before I worked at Red Hat.
Yes, they're good distros, but Fedora is a damn fine piece of work too
and powered by a lot of very committed people. The problem is that we
could do with a few others to get zealoty and enthusiastic about Fedora
Core in the same way that they (recently) get so jumpy about Ubuntu. We
shouldn't ignore articles like that because they have a tendency to help
perpetuate various silly arguments next time someone writes a story.
It's not always plain sailing with Ubuntu either. It took 1.5 days to
install and configure Dapper on my Powerbook[0] so that I could use it
as a desktop machine. Suspend didn't work because they'd patched their
kernel with some broken patches, Bluetooth took ages to get working
right, I had to manually configure the power management, lots of desktop
annoyances out of the box, etc. By contrast, Fedora Core did actually
install cleanly before I upgraded it to Rawhide. Yes it had things I
fiddled with, but the experience was much better /in this case/.
We all use the same upstream sources (plus a few patches) and everyone
is trying to reduce the numbers of patches that need to be applied, so
it stands to reason that as upstream evolves, so too will both Fedora
and Ubuntu. Yes, we'll have differences and annoyances in both but
people will still write articles like the above in any case. We need to
help convince them that Fedora is a great Linux distribution too so that
they start to criticize it for technical reasons, not ideological ones.
Jon.
[0] I mailed Mark and several others about it and I am sure the points
have been addressed by now in Eft. I'll take a look when I get time.
--
Jon Masters Phone: +44 7776 131337
Red Hat UK, Ltd. Email: jcm(a)redhat.com