On Wednesday 20 June 2007 15:39, Roshan wrote:
--- jtd wrote:
Whatever gave you the idea that fedora is "mature".
It has grown from the late nineties (in the form of RH) and has developed into a community distros over these years.
It was started primarily due to the bad blood caused by RH abandoning individual user support. They worked towards creating a community like Debian, but with some major limitations.
The fedora series is means of testing out stuff and then using the results in the RH enterprise whatever.
This means, if the test is successful and stable enough to be included with RH, the same is (or should be) available in Fedora. Right?
Not neccessarily. You need to patch, update and put out a distro after checking it on innumerable combinations. Fedora is like Debian unstable, plenty of the latest and greatest alongwith fixes from the last distro. when you install debian unstable your system breaks invariably. but it is fairly easy to fix almost always. Same with Fedora. And you most certainly dont need to reboot just to fix grub or entering the proper entries in /etc/fstab.
New users should not be installing anything anyway. Least of all a full blown linux distro not designed for a newbie desktop user.
Would the case have been the same for RH9 in those days? (just curious)
It is the case with all OSes. If you took care to know what hardware you purchased and had some understanding of how an install is organised, it is (and was) quite easy. In thepast the 1810 mobo with graphics that shared main ram, 6215 pci vga card, rtl8139 chipset, usb webcams, had been the cause of numerous failed installs -but was fixed quite easily. One cannot expect newbies to understand that xyz chipset has secret sauce registers that require nda agreements for writing a few bits into them to make it work. Or that a particular implemetation of a standard is broken etc. Installation is the job of a system vendor. There are distros like knoppix or kubuntu that is targeted at a limited set of users with limited set of packages. The authors observations might have been valid for such very limited cases.