Posts by mattdm

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: Sid/testingstable

No, it's not like that at all. CentOS Stream is much closer to the RHEL release than the Debian comparison implies. It isn't the upcoming major release itself; it _is_ the major release.

Re: I don't get it....

> Something that is *significantly* different to RHEL 8.x isn't going to be any use to them.

I think you have a basic misunderstanding here. CentOS Stream 8 will never be significantly different from RHEL 8; CentOS Stream 9 will never be significantly different from RHEL 9. All updates headed for CentOS Stream are already approved to land in that major release of RHEL, with the same general rules about stability that RHEL holds to.

More about this on the CentOS blog here: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/centos-stream-is-continuous-delivery/

If you're a Fedora fanboi, this latest release might break your heart a little

Re: Ditch SystemDerp and I'll try it

Fedora includes systemd because its authors showed up, did the work, and convinced Fedora's engineering steering committee that it it was a better approach.

If you want Fedora to move to something else, show up with *your* better thing and do the same.

Re: Red Hat

For many years, the only way to get one was to become a Red Hat employee -- you get one at new hire orientation. But.... I saw a photo of Jen Madriaga giving them out at Kubecon, so maybe there's hope for wider distribution now.

In which I am Just Sayin'....

You note "and this interface design will be quietly lost in the spittle of philosophical arguments, which is a shame", _after_ several paragraphs of things like "the sky is falling". Mayyyybe, just maybe, you could have led with the other thing?

In any case, I want to emphasize: The Fedora operating system and everything within the Fedora Project, including the tools we use to *make* the OS are free and open source and always will be. Third-party means just that.

But, we know that a) many, many people use non-free software on Fedora and b) research and user feedback indicated that lack of easy configuration was an impediment to adoption. People don't generally say "Oh, I guess I won't have my hardware work" or "I won't use Steam" if we make it difficult — they say "Oh, I guess I won't use Fedora". Then, we've basically just completely lost those people and don't have any opportunity to help show in a positive way that open source and free software *is* better.

I do appreciate that you noticed the work we put into the UX here. We went through a lot of work trying to find the right balance, and I think the result is decent. There's always room to improve, of course. THAT is an important part of what Fedora is about, too.

Red Hat eye from the Ubuntu guy: Fedora – how you doin'?

We've put a lot of work into making upgrades painless — I updated my main system to the beta the other day, and the whole process took under half an hour. And, keep in mind that we support upgrades directly from two releases back, so you only have to take that half hour once a year or so (with an approximately 7-month window in which to schedule it at your convenience.)

Re: Fedora has its ups and downs...

I'm a little biased here — but I also think I have a pretty good perspective since I have some visibility into both sides. I won't argue about whether there's a correlation here, but I definitely think it's not as causative as you suggest. The primary driver of change in Fedora is _all the stuff coming in from all the upstreams_ — it's not Red Hat developers in particular dumping things in. It's true that Red Hat funds a lot of upstream developers and upstream development as well, but that's generally done independently of either Fedora or RHEL cycles. RHEL stabilization generally happens as part of the RHEL beta process, which is completely distinct from Fedora, and it's not like (for good or ill) that is directly forced on Fedora by the RHEL schedule.

The new installer was a bit of a debacle (in communication and otherwise), but I think it's more of an oddity than a typical example. I promise we're trying very hard to not do something like that again.

Re: Ubuntu and RH Enterprise

Okay, I'll bite. What are the specific problems that you hit, and how can we make them better for you?

GitHub.io killed the distro star: Why are people so bored with the top Linux makers?

Re: Maybe the answer is that people are moving from base linux flavours

FWIW, Ubuntu, Arch, and Mint are covered on the next slide in the presentation; that's just omitted from The Register's summary article here, not the actual talk.

And, you can see that, while still very popular (and deservedly so), Ubuntu is experiencing the same decline as everyone else, just with a slightly later peak (late 2007).