On 21 March 2014 15:19, lee lee@yun.yagibdah.de wrote:
Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org writes:
I was at a large cloud conference a while ago, and almost nobody was using Fedora, and so I asked people why they chose the distribution they are building their stuff on, and why they didn’t choose Fedora. Almost universally, the response wasn’t “What I am using is great!” — it was “Oh, I don’t care. I just picked this, and that’s what I’m using and it’s fine.”
I`m not one of these people. Thinking like that, they don`t need a Linux distribution; they can as well use Windoze or Macos.
Sigh. 1. "Windows" not "Windoze" 2. If we're being picky "MacOS" 3. Most Linux distros are *much* more similar to each other than they are to Windows or Mac. I use about three different distros at work and have another two different ones at home (though one of those is a Pi, maybe count as a half). I don't find this particularly confusing. If they get on okay with the desktop on whatever they're using then more power to them.
Even if there really are a lot of interesting things going on, people who are trying to actually do things with the distribution don’t attach much importance to them.
Not paying attention to the soft- and hardware that is the basis of what you`re actually doing is a recipe for failure, and for making things difficult on yourself.
One thing Fedora shines with (so far) is reliability, and reliability is one of the requirements I have. I have been using Debian for almost twenty years until they messed up badly with their brokenarch. Doing that put Debian out of the question once and for all because they failed that requirement miserably beyond believe.
Please do not make the same mistake with Fedora. Switching to another distribution is a painful process.
I'm kind of interested to know what your use case is that makes switching distros more painful than fixing a broken install. The only guess I can make is multiple systems.
In turn, this leads to a shift in the balance between the effort to get software into a distribution and the reward of doing so. It used to be that if you had open source software, and you could convince the distros to get your get your software into a distro, that’s how you knew that you had arrived.
I have always wondered how people manage to create packages, for Debian or Fedora. I looked into it because I would like to provide packages, and I found it requires an insurmountable effort. You start with "I have written this software" and get to "I would like that ppl use it, and to make that easy, I`d like to make a package". Then you try to find out how to do that and that`s where it ends: It`s just too difficult.
Instead, you put your software on github.
If you see no value in packaging I'm surprised you aren't using a roll-your-own distro instead. It sounds like that would be a much better match for your requirements of control over everything on the machine and a minimalist system.