rootninja

Is Fedora becoming just like Windows?

The update experience in Fedora, including the recently released Fedora 12, is flawed. There are just too many packages flooding the repositories for the current release model to function efficiently and securely. They even state this on one of the fedoraproject’s wiki pages.

So, basically, what we have today is:
* Arcane
* Uncoordinated and disruptive
* Often broken, fragile, and largely untested
A very poor user experience.

Largely untested?! So I can probably submit a fancy package that wrecks havoc with a user’s desktop in a way that’s not immediately noticeable, and it will probably get signed by a release engineer and eventually make it into mainstream releases? Or, at the very least will it be made available for anyone that browses packages to find and install said malicious package? Scary thoughts.

The many combinations of packages that are possible due to this lack of coordination means that we don’t actually test any of them. There is no set that is canonical or even most likely.

Success and fail at the same time. I’m not trying to bash Fedora or Red Hat, I just get worried when they say they don’t test any combinations of packages before releasing them. At the present time, there seems to be no requirement for updates to only fix bugs or add hardware support while avoiding new feature implementation and breaking existing applications. However, they do state a number of requirements they would like to incorporate in the future.

System updates should only:
* fix critical bugs or security vulnerabilities
* provide hardware enablement

I guess this isn’t a bad thing if you have a system with “yum-updatesd” running, but is the drive here just to become more like Windows?

System updates may only be deferred for a short time after which they will be installed automatically.

Why does Red Hat, oops, I mean Fedora push so hard for the desktop experience to be a mirror of the Windows desktop experience? Shouldn’t Fedora move in it’s own direction, and not just strive to become a Windows clone?