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It seems there is some strife in the Fedora community over the upcoming GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell in Fedora 15. Some people see it as a dumbing down of the user interface and others don't. I wrote a fairly long response recently that I thought I'd share here.

This is the "a lot of KDE 3 users really hate KDE 4" being applied to GNOME. I've been a KDE user since 0.x and remember happily compiling KDE 1.0 from source.

The GNOME developers have decided to go a direction you aren't happy with... and you certainly aren't the only one. Fedora dropped KDE 3.x when 4.0.0 came out... and a significant portion of Fedora KDE users weren't happy. The main problem there though, at least for me was that KDE 4.0.0 was too darn buggy and bordering on unusable for every day work. As a result I switched to GNOME. I wasn't really happy with GNOME but at least it worked. :) Then I watched each release of KDE 4.0.x come out and I tried them. I could tell they were making progress. Then 4.1.0 came out and I found that to be good enough to switch back. Ever since then the KDE developers have been making rapid progress with each release getting better. Now we are at 4.5.5 and 4.6.0 will be in Fedora 15. How many releases? I'm not sure... but I think they came out with 5 or 6 third number releases for each second number release... ie 4.5.0, 4.5.1, 4.5.2, 4.5.3, 4.5.4, and now 4.5.5. One thing I love about Fedora is that they have followed KDE's development and upgraded it several times each Fedora release lifecycle.

So, GNOME 3 is a huge change from GNOME 2. Let's consider how much of a change it is... in contrast to KDE. KDE 4 was different than KDE 3 but it still had many of the same elements... so I'll give it an arbitrary grade of a 5 on the 1-10 change scale. GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 (aka GNOME Shell) is probably a 9.something. While there are still some things that are the same, the number of things that are different is great.

To me, as a result of the vast change... GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell, no matter how good and stable it is (unlike KDE 4.0.0)... has a big chasm of disruption that I think a significant number of users will have trouble crossing over. There are going to be a lot of unhappy people. I'm sure there will also be a lot of happy people as well. Those are the folks who have probably already tried GNOME Shell some in its pre-release state and liked it... those who are better at accepting disruption. And of course completely new users might prefer GNOME 3 over GNOME 2 if they don't have any previous experience with either... or vice versa.

Should Fedora face the challenge and ship GNOME 3? I think so. Fedora is the distro where it is more important to make change happen than it is to keep everyone happy. That's just the way it is and Red Hat Linux was that way before Fedora was even born. After all Fedora dropped KDE 3.x and shipped KDE 4.0.0 as default one release (Fedora 9?) and the world didn't end for Fedora KDE users. Many of us probably switched away until updated releases made us feel comfortable enough to switch back... but switch back I did. I'm sure there are still those who were KDE 3.x users who have refused to go to KDE 4.x even after it became pleasurable to use... but that is to be expected.

There isn't much you can do about GNOME 3. The developers get to decide. If a significant chunk of the GNOME community abandons them because they can't take the vast change... then either they'll have to swing it back some to make those folks happy... or they'll have to just continue on and hope for a new crop of users. We'll just have to see what happens. But it is their decision to make... and we won't really know how it pans out until AFTER. :)

Keep your chin up.

Of course I do want to point out that this is in stark contrast to your belief that Fedora is wanting to pander to newbies and be another Ubuntu... unless of course that is what you think GNOME 3 is?!? I've played with the Gnome Shell pre-releases some and it seems more aimed at advanced users to me.

Jonathan Corbet also gave his traditional The Kernel Report presentation at LCA 2011. I've embedded it below in webm format using the HTML 5 video tag.

If you don't see the video embedded, you can download it and play it locally.

Right-click download link: LCA2011-Kernel_Report.webm (50 min, 131 MB)

Jonathan Corbet gave a number of presentations at LCA this year. Below I've embedded his presentation entitled Kernel development: How it goes wrong and why you should be a part of it anyway in webm format using the HTML 5 video tag.

If you don't see the video embedded, you can download it and play it locally.

Right-click download link: LCA2011-Kernel_Development_Goes_Wrong.webm (44 min, 116 MB)

Marshall Kirk McKusick gave a presentation entitled A Narrative History of BSD at LCA 2011. I've embedded it below in webm format using the HTML 5 video tag.

If you don't see the video embedded, you can download it and play it locally.

Right-click download link: LCA2011-BSD_History.webm (49 min, 130 MB)

Jon Corbet gave a presentation about the lessons he has learned running Linux Weekly News for 13 years.

Right-click download link: LCA2011-LWN_13_Years.webm (48 min,128 MB)

Here is Vint Cerf's Keynote speech from LCA 2011.

You can right-click download: LCA2011-Vint_Cerf.webm (51 min, 139 MB)

At the January 2011 BozemanLUG meeting, David Eder showed us how to get an IPv6 address and then tunnel it through an existing static IPv4 address. During the meeting we discussed Jon Corbet's LWN summary of Geoff Huston's Keynote from linux.conf.au. The video of that talk has become available and is presented below in webm format. If you have any problems watching it in your browser, just right-click on the link below and "Save link target as..." to download. It should play in any newer video player that supports webm.

I subtitle this presentation, The Coming IPocalypse. :)

Right-click download link: LCA2011-Geoff_Huston.webm (54 min, 142 MB)

The Billings LUG is tonight! Thursday Jan 20th. Come on by, the address is 1123 North 11th street.

Tonight's discussion will be on SQL Basics

The OLPC Project announced the OLPC 1.75 based on an ARM CPU some time ago so it is good to finally see some of the fruits of their labor. Enjoy this video:

I noticed the creation of a new Fedora mailing list today when Rahul Sundaram sent out the first post on it... a mailing list for Fedora Remixers.

That made me wonder just how many Linux distributions there are that are Fedora-based. I did a quick search and found a Fedora wiki page that says, "There are roughly over a hundred distributions based on Fedora." Then it links to a distrowatch.com search page that shows 41 distributions that are "Fedora based".

I decided to take a brief look at those 41 distros to see how many were still active and if they were actually based on Fedora. I do not consider CentOS / RHEL derived distributions to be strictly "Fedora-based".

What do I consider active? Given Fedora's rapid release cycle and their somewhat brief support cycle, any distro that hasn't released in a year or more, isn't very active.