On Aug 15, 2014, at 8:18 AM, Andreas Nilsson <lists(a)andreasn.se> wrote:
On 08/15/2014 05:37 AM, Adam Batkin wrote:
>
> What do people think? I'm trying to be constructive here. Do other people agree
or disagree with these ideas? I do have some thoughts on how to actually fix some of these
things which might be suited to fresh threads, if I'm not barking up the wrong
tree...
I think thinking bigger than the above polish items would serve us greatly. I have tons
of things that annoy me as well [as a web developer], but there must be bigger fish to fry
out there.
It's a good point.
What would it take for your friends who are developers to move over
from a non-free Operating System to Fedora, apart from window management behaviour?
I wonder if that question is a trap because it really isn't all that much about the
desktop behavior. I use Macs, and there are several show stopper bugs that come well
before GNOME or KDE or xfce: overheating and MCE errors, possibly one dead Mac as a result
of this; wireless doesn't work out of the box, is a PITA to figure out how to get it
to work; trackpad behavior is too erratic to tolerate more than a couple hours worth;
I've never had success getting bluetooth to work, thus no alternatives to the
trackpad.
Any non-free OS user coming over to Fedora would have their own list of show stoppers
before the desktop even comes up. Probably top on the list is video drivers.
How do I get dev friends to move to Fedora when I can't even do that? I'm
increasingly likely to give up using Macs to run Fedora, and get hardware that will work
instead. My dev friends won't do that. OS X doesn't lend itself all that well to
virtualizing other OS's: all the VM's are memory/CPU pigs, and only VirtualBox is
FOSS.
So I think the question is a trap because it emphasizes conversion, rather than growing
the market for FOSS, and Fedora in particular. What happens if any or all of the following
were to happen?
- Make VirtualBox suck less on OS X and Windows, because it seems like a lot more work
getting linux, Fedora in particular, to run; at least on Macs.
- Fedora Workstation runs in a container on Fedora Server, and any OS X, Windows,
Chromebook client uses Fedora Workstation via Guacamole.
- Making it possible and easy to install a Fedora development environment on OS X (via
Macports) and/or Windows. Make the Fedora development environment a portable infiltrating
product.
Chris Murphy