Sometime back, I had a very long and heated debate with the Fedora community on the direction Linux in general and Fedora in particular should take to increase usage among the common users. Let's leave it saying that we had some strong differences of opinion and we agreed to disagree.

The developer community stands by the principle of fixing the upstream code (which in theory is a good idea and the way to go) contrary to my suggestion of fixing the releases incrementally in terms of patches and serivce packs which is lot more practical.

Being developed by community, Linux still lags way behind the more popular OS in terms of mass user appeal in terms of user friendliness and eye candy. It's not that there is no eye candy, but the overall look and feel of Linux still feels on the dark side as compared to Windows or MacOS. Before my debate and release of Fedora 8, I had written this post here on my website. After two months, I still stand by words. The developer community stands by the principle of fixing the upstream code (which in theory is a good idea and the way to go) contrary to my suggestion of fixing the releases incrementally in terms of patches and serivce packs which is lot more practical. You could always integrate those fixes in the later release which would then have a more reasonable release cycle of 18 to 24 months. Maybe it comes from my background in Windows, but I feel that asking a normal user to rebuild his / her system every 6-8 months based on the release and development cycle of Fedora is simply not fair and turns away a lot of potential converts. Given the very high cost of Vista and Microsoft's recent plans to crackdown on "supposedly" illegitimate copies of Vista.

After Fedora 8 was released, I downloaded it and took it on a test drive. Of course being hobbyist and amateur, I don't have a lot of hardware that I can spare for such testing so I did the next best thing, virtual machine on a VMWare with enough resources to throw at it to get a decent performance. Fedora 8 still has the dark theme and I found it very difficult to maneuver. Maybe it is the fault of running a 64-bit version with a fast computer, but whenever I hit one key, it used to get transmitted three four times and then I had to back track. And this is just to login. Imagine what would happen when I try to do some real testing. It was a very bad experience. None of my other virtual sessions gave me this problem. One of them is Fedora Core 6 64-bit edition and I also have Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit edition. Something probably the developers should look at.

I tried a lot to make it work but so far I have failed and have temporarily given up. Maybe I will try again some other day.