"Red Hat plans Linux desktop 'for the masses'", thoughts?

[Adamant1988]

Asked if part of the strategy is the mass consumer market, Cornier responded that Red Had has "no plans to go and sell this offering at Best Buy, if that's what you mean by the mass consumer market. Customers will be able to download it and get a Red Hat Network subscription on the Web for it, which is what we feel is the distribution wave of the future anyway," he said.
source: Source Article (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2105246,00.asp)
Just to stop you from getting TOO excited ;)

[teaker1s]

unless they become less elite and user friendly then they will stay as a corporate provider.

[23meg]

"Less elite"?


elite , -noun

1. (often used with a plural verb) the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.
2. (used with a plural verb) persons of the highest class: Only the elite were there.
3. a group of persons exercising the major share of authority or influence within a larger group: the power elite of a major political party.

[teaker1s]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite

[Adamant1988]

/me looks at title of this thread.

Guys, I'm pretty sure it's more about Red Hat and less about the meaning of elite...

[CocoAUS]

I'm not really too excited about this. I have a feeling it will bomb. Fedora is where the attention should be focused. Work on making the defaults better and kicking yum into gear, and they might have a decent distro. But when you have a moron developer who decide to go against the other 99.999% of Fedora users and decides that Firefox 2 isn't worth having, so only Firefox 1.5 will be included in the repos, and then he goes on to whine and cry on the mailing list that "no one respects him," you know you've got problems. This is where Ubuntu shines--they give people what they want. The Red Hat guys don't generally do that, and they're too sensitive to criticism. Take a stroll through some of the other Fedora threads, and you'll see how the Fedora users get all uptight if you even mention yum being slow or any other criticism. This mindset in the community and the developers is going to hold them back.

[Adamant1988]

I'm not really too excited about this. I have a feeling it will bomb. Fedora is where the attention should be focused. Work on making the defaults better and kicking yum into gear, and they might have a decent distro. But when you have a moron developer who decide to go against the other 99.999% of Fedora users and decides that Firefox 2 isn't worth having, so only Firefox 1.5 will be included in the repos, and then he goes on to whine and cry on the mailing list that "no one respects him," you know you've got problems. This is where Ubuntu shines--they give people what they want. The Red Hat guys don't generally do that, and they're too sensitive to criticism. Take a stroll through some of the other Fedora threads, and you'll see how the Fedora users get all uptight if you even mention yum being slow or any other criticism. This mindset in the community and the developers is going to hold them back.

This would be based off of Fedora, so I don't understand where you're going with it.

[Peter Mount]

I used to be a Fedora user (i.e. from version 3 to 5). I think before they really bring it to the masses they need to look at a few things.

1 Yum being rather slow

2 Being locked into using the latest versions of software for that version of Fedora. This is what made me change to Kubuntu as I needed an older version of PHP and MySQL on my desktop.

3 Issues with rpm. I'm not an expert but I've been hearing bad things about rpm lately.

Apart from these core issues Fedora seems like a promising distrobution. If it wasn't for my problem with point 2 above I might still be using Fedora. Fedora is what we used in my IT course and that's where I really first learned to use Linux properly.

[CocoAUS]

This would be based off of Fedora, so I don't understand where you're going with it.

My point is that Fedora is already a community-maintained project with (supposedly) the community in mind for the userbase. Some of the things that happen as a result of having a for-the-masses distro (like Ubuntu) are bad, and I'd rather see Fedora just get its act together rather than see a whole new Ubuntu wannabe distro. Besides, if the Red Hat guys can't get stuff together with the distros they currently are involved with, then I doubt they'll be able to do very well with a more for-the-masses distro.

It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, and I'll most likely give it a try. But seriously, if they can't get the stuff they have going on right now to be what it should be, why hold out hopes on anything new?

[Adamant1988]

My point is that Fedora is already a community-maintained project with (supposedly) the community in mind for the userbase. Some of the things that happen as a result of having a for-the-masses distro (like Ubuntu) are bad, and I'd rather see Fedora just get its act together rather than see a whole new Ubuntu wannabe distro. Besides, if the Red Hat guys can't get stuff together with the distros they currently are involved with, then I doubt they'll be able to do very well with a more for-the-masses distro.

It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, and I'll most likely give it a try. But seriously, if they can't get the stuff they have going on right now to be what it should be, why hold out hopes on anything new?

It will probably be just like RHEL, take a snapshot of Fedora fix it up, and release that. Also, give me an example of them not being able to get their stuff together, they just pushed out RHEL 5.

[izanbardprince]

Red Hat needs to do something for a consumer version, Fedora just doesn't cut it.

The main thing keeping me back from anything Suse, Red Hat, or Mandriva release is that RPM packages are pretty much always a crapshoot, and theres no guarantee that a package built on one RPM distro won't break on another.

Fedora also likes to do kernel updates all the time, so just after you finish setting up your hardware, the next update could kill all of your progress.

IMO, Fedora is little better than using Debian Sid.

[igknighted]

Red Hat needs to do something for a consumer version, Fedora just doesn't cut it.

The main thing keeping me back from anything Suse, Red Hat, or Mandriva release is that RPM packages are pretty much always a crapshoot, and theres no guarantee that a package built on one RPM distro won't break on another.

Fedora also likes to do kernel updates all the time, so just after you finish setting up your hardware, the next update could kill all of your progress.

IMO, Fedora is little better than using Debian Sid.

Well, what wrong with using Debian Sid? I'm posting from it right now. Kernel upgrades and such are for people who want them, not for everyone. The thing with Fedora and Sid that differs from Ubuntu is that you are next epected (or even encouraged necessarily) to upgrade every package. In ubuntu and windows, you update everything that comes up. In Fedora (and Sid and Gentoo and others) you get options to upgrade everything, but are only encouraged to upgrade that which you want/need newer... if your kernel is working fine, do some research to see if the new one offers any security plugs, bug fixes, features, etc. that you want. If it doesn't, then leave it. Get the next one if you really want.

Fedora is by no means linux for everyone. Red Hat realizes this. Fedora isn't intended to be linux for everyone, and doesn't make that claim. As such, it does what other "not for newbs" distro's do. Either Red Hat can force Fedora to change, or it can create a new distro. I am glad they took this approach, as (and yes I use Sid and Gentoo too) this is how I want my system to work.

RPM packages should see a rapid improvement as a collection soon. The project was dropped by Red Hat some time ago and was only recently (within the last year) picked up for development by the community (I think its the Suse crowd and the Fedora crowd mostly, not so much with the Mandriva/PCLOS batch). So packaging has been hit or miss for a while. But expect improvements as the community takes over.

PS: this is not a reversal on my opinions of Yum, I still like it and plan to stick up for it... but the issues with the lack of development for RPM are real and being corrected.

EDIT: More on my opinion on why packages updating the Sid/Gentoo/Fedora way is more useful:

Have you ever (as a Ubuntu user) ran into an issue with a certain app or kernel version that Ubuntu has as default? I have. Or a new version of an app comes out and you want it, but its not in the repos (FF2 with dapper for example). There are ways of working around this, but having the latest in the repo's all the time makes this WAY easier. Fedora isn't quite this rolling-release like Sid and Gentoo, but its a nice hybrid. You can't always get the very latest, but you have a lot more upgrades than a Ubuntu does. Its a fine line between running on the true bleeding edge, and locking users in to the original software.

[Rice_slayer]

I use Fedora Core 6 and Im hopefully changing to Ubuntu today as Fedora is a nightmare to get ANY type of media to work properly on any platform and when I fixed my 5.1 sound issue, online video/sound stopped working! Fedora needs to be more user friendly to become mainstream...