Matthew Miller Named New Fedora Linux Project Leader

darthcamaro (735685) writes "Barely a week after Robyn Bergeron announced her intention to step down, Red Hat today announced that Matthew Miller is now the new Fedora Project Leader. Miller is the guy that came up with the whole Fedora.next proposal which is now reshaping Red Hat's community Linux project. Miller has a clear view of how his leadership will work in the cat-herding world of open source: 'As the FPL, you've got the responsibility, but no actual authority to tell anyone to do things,' Miller said. 'So you have to find people that have an interest and are aligned with the direction you want to go.'"

Comments

Hopefully he can fix the failures caused by Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

and systemd...

No authority?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't he just send a memo to a problematic Red Hat developer's supervisor if he needed to exert some authority? Between dwindling "community" involvement and the creation of the WG's (staffed with mostly Red Hat employees), Fedora ceased being a community driven distribution a while back. At least in comparison to a true community distribution like Debian.

Re:No authority?

[The New Guy 2.0]

Yep, open source has always been a bit of a mess. There's been too many contrary objectives, and mistakes made along the way. There needs to be a good decision maker on projects as big as this.

Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Miller, forget the past couple of years. Throw out everything that's been done since Fedora 18. Go back to a stable, usable OS. Put Fedora 19, 20, and I guess 21 by now out of their misery. Get rid of Gnome 3. Get rid of the broken install program. Fedora has become a broken mess over the past few years. This is your chance to save it before it is totally kaput. Go back to what used to work and start over.

I say this because I just tried to build a new Fedora system. Fedora 20 is a new low - not only would the OS not work, the installer would not work. I tried various things like graphics "safe mode" and all I got was a black screen. I had to get my Fedora 19 DVD to install Fedora. It's that broken.

Mr. Miller, is that what you want Fedora to be? The OS no one uses because it's a broken mess and when people think of the name, they think of a black screen that they can't get to work, and a graphical environment that destroyed over a decade of my Linux workflows because it's so broken it can't be used?

Re:Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[Anonymous Coward]

I say this because I just tried to build a new Fedora system. Fedora 20 is a new low - not only would the OS not work, the installer would not work. I tried various things like graphics "safe mode" and all I got was a black screen. I had to get my Fedora 19 DVD to install Fedora. It's that broken.

Glitches like that are typical for Linux distros. The proper quality assurance is missing. Let's put Windows 7 installation DVD in that computer and I bet there would be no black screen. Just sayin'. No wonder companies or governments do not want to adopt Linux on PC desktops. The support costs for solving all these funky little problems would be enormous.

Re:Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[mx b]

I say this because I just tried to build a new Fedora system. Fedora 20 is a new low - not only would the OS not work, the installer would not work. I tried various things like graphics "safe mode" and all I got was a black screen. I had to get my Fedora 19 DVD to install Fedora. It's that broken.

Glitches like that are typical for Linux distros. The proper quality assurance is missing. Let's put Windows 7 installation DVD in that computer and I bet there would be no black screen. Just sayin'. No wonder companies or governments do not want to adopt Linux on PC desktops. The support costs for solving all these funky little problems would be enormous.

To the OP: Have you tried to contact Fedora about it? There are so many hardware combinations out there, it's impossible to test everything. Personally, I have installed Fedora 20 on several different systems (desktops and laptops!) and have had no issues. All drivers installed correctly, etc. I actually really like Fedora 20 compared to how it was a few releases ago. I used to have Fedora 15 and THAT was a buggy mess -- not just GNOME 3, but a lot of the software and servers that you would expect to be rock solid. Do you really want to go back to that? I think we need to keep moving forward, but iron out the bugs as we go, and the only way to do that is to report bugs and try to work with them. Ultimately, Fedora was always supposed to be bleeding-edge -- if you want stability, then Ubuntu LTS or OpenSUSE or even CentOS might be a better match for you.

To the P: I have had Windows 7 and Windows XP blue screen immediately after installation. I have had trouble with getting the monitor to show at the correct resolution, or the sound to play, or the graphics card to be detected numerous times. I have had explorer crash on me and reset everything. I've had Windows Update not be able to find the driver for a very common device, and so I've had to hunt down the drivers online and install them -- except the drivers are only given out by the company as .inf files, so I have to do the add hardware wizard manually rather than letting it automagically configure. I'm not necessarily trying to put Windows down here -- but I do like to clarify to people that, over the years I have installed OSes personally and professionally, it very OFTEN goes wrong the moment you put a version of Windows that wasn't designed for that computer on there, and sometimes even when it IS the version of Windows on the sticker on the computer tower. Upgrades suck, hell even doing the recovery disk sometimes causes trouble and you have to manually update drivers anyway. Both Windows and Linux have the problem of being installed on an extremely large amount of possible configurations that is impossible to test 100%.

If you build custom PCs that are verified to work great with Linux, you experience the same level "It Just Works" as you would other OSes. If a vendor sold such PCs, you wouldn't have much support cost at all because it would Just Work (TM(R)), much like buying a Windows PC from Dell (theoretically) or a Mac from Apple.

Re:Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's put Windows 7 installation DVD in that computer

Not just ungrammatical, but illegal.

Re:Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[DuckDodgers]

Fedora is a community-developed Linux distribution with a small amount of financial backing from one company (Red Hat) that does barely a billion dollars a year in business. They're up against two companies, Microsoft and Apple, that both do comfortably more than 50 billion dollars in revenue a year. OEMs scramble to make their consumer computer products Microsoft-compatible because that's where literally 99% of their revenue is. OEMs ignore Linux (outside the server room) because that's where their revenue is not. Somehow the Fedora developers - just like the Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, etc... can't come up with an end product that matches Windows for ease of install and hardware support.

All of this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone paying attention. I am sympathetic to great-grandparent AC's problems with Fedora 20 install. I've had similar problems many times. But I'm not angry that a team of volunteers can't match the hardware support from a company that has literally more than a hundred times more developers, testers, etc...

Now look at cost. In the past five years I refurbished one computer in my house, assembled a new computer, and received three different computers from my employers. That's $250 in Microsoft's pocket, and I haven't donated $250 or anything near it to any open source project in the same period. We the Linux 1% have to start putting our money where our mouth is on this - either donate cash, or help out.

Just remember...

[The New Guy 2.0]

If you're working for Fedora, try not to have your hat handed to you.

A Former Fedora User's Advice To Mr. Miller

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple. Switch default to KDE. Fuck Gnome 3.

Why I hate fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

0.. grub2 MUST DIE
1. Bleeding edge - updates almost every day, not infrequently unstable until a month or two of updates after a release.
2. What was wrong with init, that *REQUIRED* first upstart, then systemD (which also involves a lot more typing)?
      2a. Why does systemd REQUIRE configuration files in .xml? Are y'all unable to actually type? Are you REQUIRING
                    use of a mouse and GUI (not for any server, if I have anything to say about it)? What actual problem is there
                    with plain, clear text config files?
3. gnome3 was a disaster. Now that I think of it, it reminds me of Windows8. They both look like they're intended to run on
                    smartphones, NOT ON A REAL COMPUTER.
4. gnome's insistance that it refuses to start ssh-agent (for all the folks who have smartcards and have to use them at work).
5. See 0. Take item zero, and shove it down your throat.

                    mark, running CentOS at home and work - I want a *stable* system, not one I need to debug

Re:Why I hate fedora

[porjo]

I'm running Fedora 20 on my work desktop and find it ok. Updates do occasionaly break things in annoying ways, but I guess that's to be expected with a bleeding edge distro. I share your pain when it comes to grub2 and systemd; supposedly better architectuarlly however useability sucks big time. I use gnome3 and have no major issues with it. My main gripe with Linux on the desktop (Fedora included) is the abysmal video performance due to poor drivers and integration. Having firefox/chrome max cpu when watching flash video is just depressing in 2014.

Re:Why I hate fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

I was actually going to send feedback to slashdot today on this, for some reason this site pegs one of my cores at 100%. I haven't found any other site that does the same thing so I don't even know where to start looking for why. (Fedora 20, chrome). Flash works fine for me though.

I finally upgraded from fedora 14, so I went with mate - but the change to mariadb and apache 2.4 broke basically everything for me which was really annoying. My dual video card, 3x 2560x1440 monitor setup worked out of the box though which was pretty awesome.

I hope he's never said anything about gay people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or him and Brendan will have to create their own organization.

Gnome; Mate; Cinnamon; Unity; Xfce4...Save Me

[tuppe666]

Hopefully he can fix the failures caused by Gnome and systemd...

I actually don't care about systemd. I personally welcome the change. It was actually Fedora that actually implemented systemd first. The detractors...I guess your one, claim it will be a mess like Pulseaudio, I love Pulseaudio, what I hope is it gets managed better than Pulseaudio.

Gnome is not causing failures!! It is at best a misguided attempt to Tabletify the Gnome desktop with Gnome shell(ok it is messing with the best file manager too)...and results on a 22" (lets be honest even a 15") screen are disastrous(even their developers are walking away from it). Ubuntu's clashing Unity interface...albeit slightly better than standard Gnome, clashes in all kinds of ways(Its f***ing QT for for a start), and they are actually forking components. My last fix was to use Cinnamon, which was like a beautiful remix of Gnome current beating it into submission, and giving me a solution BETTER than any desktop...only to fork Gnome not work with it. Mate is everything you loved about Gnome 2...except at an evolutionary dead end. That leaves XFCE4(Which I am loving) which is a great replacement for Gnome...better in many ways (4.10 anyway), yet its support and Development is so slow Its release is currently a many many months behind users are actually questioning whether its alive...It is just well...

The last thing anyone wants is to fix to Gnomes failures(sic) what people want is a Cathedral approach or the Bazaar to kick in to satisfy today's many versions or personal computing, but we are now choosing between broken;mismatched;patched up; frozen; glacial...with no end in sight.

Re:Gnome; Mate; Cinnamon; Unity; Xfce4...Save Me

[blackpaw]

Interesting until you slagged off Qt. Its a superior framework and for me, vastly better than the mess that is Gtk.

Re:Gnome; Mate; Cinnamon; Unity; Xfce4...Save Me

[rgbatduke]

It is, indeed, sad. Gnome 2 was a perfectly usable desktop. Gnome 3 as you say looks like and acts like a "kinda" tablet interface, but it doesn't make it on tablets and truly sucks on desktops and laptops compared to G2. My own solution has been to use a release that still supports G2. It is an imperfect solution, but I work at the interface level, and the imperfections and risks are all occult or fixable with care, where nothing can "fix" G3 but snipping the entire fork and pretending that it never existed. In the meantime, I have my six hot keyed desktops, my keystroke-cyclable windows, and can work (or play) for hours in ten or twenty windows and never touch my mousepad or take my fingers off of the home keys.

That's the real problem with G3. Tablets are lovely in the Macintosh/Apple sense -- you can learn to use their interface in a day, and pay for that knowledge for a lifetime in reduced productivity compared to what you could realize with a more complex interface with more configurable options and ways of doing things. If they had kept G2's keyboard/mouse driven structure and general function and customizability and merely added support for a user-selectable touchscreen swipe mode, I'd a) never have noticed and; b) if I ever found myself trying to run G3 on a tablet and DID notice, pleasantly surprised to find that it had a tablet-savvy mode that otherwise preserved my desktop setup (as best as possible given the differential screen sizes).

The other sad thing about not only Gnome but most of the rest of the desktops is that no progress was made in places where it would have been GOOD to make it. For example, I work on at least three or four different (all linux based) systems. They have different screen resolutions, different sized hard disks, different speed CPUs, different capacity memories. Yet Gnome is still too stupid for me to be able to clone my home directory across those systems -- or e.g. NFS mount a single home directory from a server on all of those systems -- and have it just work, fixing the font sizes, default window sizes, and so on. I've written my own highly custom startup scripts in the past that do things like determine architecture etc and then do the right thing by literally overwriting some of core startup data or follow complex conditional branches when logging in, but this sucks and is a pain to maintain. Yet nobody even tries to do better, at the right level (that is, within e.g. gconf or the gnome configuration manager itself). Linux has actually gotten worse as a client-server, shared home directory architecture, compared to what it was when it was closer to e.g. SunOS and so on back in the 90's (and it wasn't completely great back then).

Whine, whine, I know. If I were a good open source human and wanted this fix, I'd participate. And if I were a frickin' robot who didn't need sleep or if I weren't I but we, me and my ten clones, I would. But one lifetime isn't enough time to do all that I'm doing already. So all I can do is pray that somebody, somewhere, keeps G2 alive or forks it out and develops it in ways that do NOT break the features that I rely on most to support my daily work activities. G3 was actually the deal breaker with me and Fedora -- I stuck with it until then and even thrived, but to get G2 I had to go back to Centos 6 (and overlay the good parts of Fedora, namely Centos ports of the key Fedora add-on software). If Fedora re-embraced a functional G2 fork or clone (that worked and was well-maintained) I'd be perfectly happy to go back to it. I never minded having bleeding edge software handy, even at the moderate expense of stability -- as long as they don't break Fedora Core to the point where it interferes with workflow, that is, at the desktop provisioning level.

rgb

Re:Hopefully he can fix the failures caused by Gno

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is an awful blight, almost as bad as the SELinux blight.

Fedora installer

[Anonymous Coward]

The new installer in (f18&&f20) is a mess every time i tried to configure it with my wifi card it crashed. BTW the driver(ath9k_htc) AND firmware are opensource.