Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora

loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.

Comments

Re:While we're fantasizing ...

[Kyouryuu]

I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.

Really?

[eno2001]

I hadn't noticed anything other than BETTER quality from the Fedora project compared to previous RedHat offerings. I am using a mix of RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 3 at home and at work and from where I stand FC3 is a HUGE jump past RH9. The hardware support is better, the apps are even better integrated than before and the functionality overall is extermely impressive. Examples:

1. The changes to Nautilus have made file management and access much easier with many conveniences like thumbnails, media previews, photo gallery views, etc... 2. The integration of remote mounts (SMB [ie. Windows file shares], FTP, SSH) is spectacular
3. USB device support is nearly flawless. I plugged in my brand new Epson Stylus R300 and just started printing. I plugged in a USB flash drive and it mounted and placed an icon on the desktop. I plugged in my Sony Mavica CD digital camera and it asked me about importing images into a gallery. The gallery also displayed all the inluded EXIF information. Just beautiful.
4. GIMP 2.0 takes some getting used to, but it looks promising (Just for the record I love GIMP 1.x)
5. LVM2 with kernel support at boot so that you no longer have to deal with the archaic notion of partitions
6. And of course... much improved performance on the same hardware. I have been using the same P4 at work for the past three years. RH9 was OK on it but admittedly a little slow with the default packages. I recompiled nearly everything and got performance more in line with Windows XP on the same box. But... with FC3, the same box didn't need any of the custom compiles and tweaks the RH9 did to get even better performance

Overall, I'd say Fedora has been a rousing success. I RedHat says they plan to put more effort into it, this can only mean greater things.