4 ms·

I'm a bit late to the party, but what I'd like most from Fedora (and by extension, Gnome / Systemd, ... devs) is something on the meta level. This isn't meant

I'm a bit late to the party, but what I'd like most from Fedora (and by extension, Gnome / Systemd, ... devs) is something on the meta level. This isn't meant to sound harsh, but I don't know how to say it. Please don't do the cascade of attention-deficient teenagers thing. Please take backwards compatibility seriously. And please give me a stable distribution. Stable doesn't mean a years old Firefox. CentOS is not stable, it is stale. Stable can mean always going with the latest and greatest software. But it means I write a program now, and I can be sure it works 5 years later with no or minimal changes - and importantly, not looking fallen out-of-time! A frozen Gnome 3.24 is not stable, it is stale once development moves on. Gnome was stable in, say, ~2.14 - 2.28 (I'm just making the numbers up) - it was still receiving new features, widgets, themes. The same applies to Fedora as a whole. If you have to ship multiple versions of libraries, then be it so. But even better would be to influcence the developers to avoid breaking changes. Take backwards compatibility religiously, like Microsoft. I know it is not easy, but that is what I'd really love to see (before e.g. three finger guestures). There is a big overlap between Fedora developers, and Gnome/Glib/Systemd/Networkmanager/Wayland/... developers, so you are in a great position to do so. All in all, I like do Fedora. As others have said, it is really polished, like Ubuntu used to be. I used to use Debian and Ubuntu, but when things started moving and breaking under me (and in order to get up to date things I couldn't just live on a ESR) I moved to Windows. Once the Wayland dust settles, I'm definitely looking to move back to Linux/Fedora again.

reacweb 10y ago
Yes! IMHO a stable distribution is more important than new features. The fact that 16.04 has broken my network access because of my NAS mount point is one more proof that people at ubuntu and gnome are still trying to mimic windows and have not understood the differentiating advantages of unix: stability and network. At work, my most used windows applications are firefox, putty, Xming and VNC viewer to access hundreds of sites (Portuguese, Nederlands, home computer and all the linux computers of the enterprise with a X11 display forward). Tunnels are configured in putty so that I can show my current projects without putting them on internet. My wife traveling with her laptop can wake the home PC (wake on lan) and mount the disks (sshfs) to access files. I do not want to spend hours fixing system issues (like I did before on windows). I just want a stable system where I can add some minor customizations (like the PES preview http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.h...) and add some docker images with tailored development environments.
arunarunarun 10y ago
That's what all the effort around Flatpak is for edit: link to Christian's post about it -- https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/06/21/fedora-workstation-24-is-out-and-flatpak-is-now-officially-launched/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/06/21/fedora-workstation...
mattdm 10y ago
So, we are working on this, not just with Flatpack, but with a broad initiative we call "Modularity". (I know that's not the best name, but naming things is famously one of two hard problems in CS¹.) The big problem in operating systems in general is "too fast + too slow", and we are aiming to solve it. See https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/ https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/ for background on this initiative, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZftb2Wgi4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZftb2Wgi4 if you like your information in video-presentation form. 1 . Along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors, of course

reacweb 10y ago

Yes! IMHO a stable distribution is more important than new features. The fact that 16.04 has broken my network access because of my NAS mount point is one more proof that people at ubuntu and gnome are still trying to mimic windows and have not understood the differentiating advantages of unix: stability and network. At work, my most used windows applications are firefox, putty, Xming and VNC viewer to access hundreds of sites (Portuguese, Nederlands, home computer and all the linux computers of the enterprise with a X11 display forward). Tunnels are configured in putty so that I can show my current projects without putting them on internet. My wife traveling with her laptop can wake the home PC (wake on lan) and mount the disks (sshfs) to access files. I do not want to spend hours fixing system issues (like I did before on windows). I just want a stable system where I can add some minor customizations (like the PES preview http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.h...) and add some docker images with tailored development environments.

arunarunarun 10y ago

That's what all the effort around Flatpak is for edit: link to Christian's post about it -- https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/06/21/fedora-workstation-24-is-out-and-flatpak-is-now-officially-launched/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/06/21/fedora-workstation...

mattdm 10y ago

So, we are working on this, not just with Flatpack, but with a broad initiative we call "Modularity". (I know that's not the best name, but naming things is famously one of two hard problems in CS¹.) The big problem in operating systems in general is "too fast + too slow", and we are aiming to solve it. See https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/ https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/ for background on this initiative, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZftb2Wgi4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZftb2Wgi4 if you like your information in video-presentation form. 1 . Along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors, of course