
Fedora Linux Set to Build Agile Core - rohshall
http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/fedora-linux-set-to-build-agile-core
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dmckeon
Fedora seems to cling to the optical media model, where everything low-level
is packaged as a CD or DVD image - installs, spins, and so forth. Bloat tends
to accumulate to fill up to media sizes, and it is as if USB drives and
networks did not exist.

I'd be delighted to be able to copy a small image to a USB thumb drive, boot
from it, install a _very minimal_ Fedora OS - not even including @Base and
@Core by default - basically grub2, kernel, console, and just enough tool-
chain to support the yum package manager, then 'yum install' some short lists
of packages.

Then all of these spins, rings, bubbles, and similar jargon could just be
lists of top-level packages (with dependencies implied, not explicitly listed)
to feed to 'yum install'.

The real 'core' of the OS supports whatever the packagers tend to require, the
package/dependency engines become critical to all of the flavors, spins,
rings, jargon-du-jour, and the users get to have just what they want installed
_and no more_.

No CD or DVD images, less bloat, and and an opportunity for packages to
compete on footprint (Foo has 13% fewer dependencies than Bar, Baz installs in
half the space of Zap).

And Goldilocks and the 3 Bears lived happily ever after :-)

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na85
Fedora does a lot of things really well. I use it daily on my personal laptop.
Yum is so much nicer than apt-get and many things Just Work™.

It also does a lot of things really poorly.

-Interacting with the people in their official IRC channel is painful, and many of the power users are outright hostile if not cyberbullies. The community is quite toxic.

-Fedora-modded kernels have seen a massive regression in power consumption in the latest release. My laptop under Fedora 17 and 18 used to idle at a respectable 6.5 Watts. That's up to about 12 Watts now.

-Fedora already moves quickly and as a result some parts of the project don't keep up. A lot of the documentation is for Fedora versions that are EOL.

I don't think the move to Agile will be a positive change.

