Does Fedora Linux need to be more stable?
Fedora Linux is one of the best known Linux distributions, and it's proven to be quite popular with some users. But is Fedora stable enough or does it need some additional improvement in that area?
A developer at Red Hat recently shared his thoughts about Fedora Workstation and the ongoing work of improving its stability.
Red Hat's Christian Schaller reports:
One of the things that makes me really happy in terms of the public reception to the Fedora Workstation is all the people calling out how stable and solid it is, as this was and is one of our big goals from the start of the Fedora Workstation effort.
From the start we wanted to bury the old idea of Fedora being only for people who didn't mind risking a lot of instability in return for being on the so called bleeding edge. We also wanted to bury the related idea that by using Fedora you where basically alpha testing highly unstable and unfinished software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yet at the same time we did want to preserve and build upon the idea that Fedora is a great operating system if you want to experience a lot of the latest and greatest new developments as they are happening. At first glance those two goals might seem a bit contradictory, but we decided that we should be able to do both by both adjusting our policies a bit and also by relying more on the Fedora retrace server as our bug fixing prioritization tool.
So in terms of policies the division of Fedora into a distinct server and workstation images and also the clearer separation of the spins, allowed us to start making decisions without worrying so much how they affected other usecases than our own. Because sometimes what from a user perspective seems like a bug or something being broken was non-workstation policy decisions getting in the way of the desktop behaving as expected, for instance firewall rules hindering basic desktop functions.
Secondly we incorporated a more careful approach into what and when we brought in new stuff, meaning we still try to keep on top of major upstream developments and be a leading edge system, but at the same time we do a little mental exercise for each decision to make sure its a decision that makes us leading edge and not bleeding edge. And if we really want something in, but it isn't 100% ready for prime time yet we do what we have done with Wayland or the GTK3 port of LibreOffice, we make it available as an option for early adopters, but we default to the safer choice while we work out the last wrinkles. (Btw, if you are interested in progress on Wayland, Kevin Martin, sent out an emailing with a link to a good Wayland development status just before the Holidays.
Christian's post caught the attention of Linux redditors and they weren't shy about sharing their thoughts about Fedora:
Kickassturing: "Fedora rocks! :D It really is stable. I just wait a few months after a new release to update."
Jonessupa: "So why do you wait few months?"
Anonymo: "Because it's not stable."
Bambidal: "Been using F23 since alpha. It was a bit buggier than F21 and F22 at that stage, but very much usable. Since stable release it has been quite good. Very much so."
Roscocoltrane: "I've been using fedora 23 since the beta and it's super stable. The upgrade from fedora 22 wasn't too hard. My only problem is crash with TF2/HD7970/radeon. So yeah, technically it crashes, but I guess it would crash ubuntu as well."
TheDunadan29: "This is part of what drew to me about Fedora. I like being on the latest version of everything. But I sometimes opt to wait purely for stability purposes. So Fedora seemed to appeal to the best of both worlds to me.
I've always liked Fedora, from when I first tried a live version if it back in 2012. And now I'm running a permanent install on my laptop after distro hopping from Ubuntu (trying to escape some bugs Ubuntu keeps throwing at me)."
Maeries: "It's quite ironic, because I tried fedora for the first time a few days ago and every time I opened the software centre like thing it crashed the whole system."
Axiomatic345: "I must be alone in this but I found Fedora to be not stable at all. Fedora sometimes packages even more bleeding edge stuff than rolling distros. Thing is, many users running on desktop will not probably notice all this but when I installed Fedora on my work laptop I had to eventually uninstall after few weeks."
LvS: "Yes, I can totally fault Fedora here. Because it's 100% their choice to value new versions of stuff over working versions of stuff. Which is fine until they run around and claim that working versions is what their focus is. That sounds kinda BS now, don't you think?"