John Summerfield wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Much of his problems had to do with 3rd party software like the
>>> Nvidia drivers, skype, etc. It's hard to imagine how ubuntu could
>>> be more hostile to 3rd parties than fedora.
>> ----
>> I'm glad you have such a positive assessment of Fedora.
>
> Feel free to point out how I'm wrong if you can find any cases where
> the distro goes out of its way to help enable its users to install/use
> any 3rd party item. The best thing I can say is that they try to be
> internally self-consistent most of the time. But in my opinion, an
> operating system should be just be a platform where you install other
> things. If it doesn't either provide a stable interface for those
> things or a mechanism to help deal with its unstable nature, there's
> not much point to using it.
>
Many years ago, RH used to ship CDE, maybe around RHL 4.x.
Unfortunately, CDE had a security problem. CDE is closed software. RH
takes security more seriously than its supplier did. RH could not get a
fix in a suitable timeframe.
RH immediately withdrew support, suggested people did not use it, and
offered paying customers a credit against their next purchase.
RH was a new company then; anyone who's still around from then is likely
senior management now.
Whatever their beliefs then, I'm sure that that experienced moved them a
a few points towards "open source and only open source."
But that has nothing to do with my point about enabling the user to
install additional software which is why I have an operating system in
the first place.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com