Let’s not try to accommodate people with years of established habits.
Let’s make it easy for people new to Fedora.
Consider the word default as referring to people who don’t have an established opinion about what they want.
Very true. People in the “Distrotube cathegory” are not the most important. New people need an easy GUI to set things up etc.
Btw I should really work on that Plasma welcome dialog for Kinoite
Oh! Homebrew, I had not considered that. I was struggling to get the pycharm pro flatpak to use python interpreters outside of the flatpak, but maybe I have been thinking about the dev tools the wrong way
I would be very excited to contribute to an effort/business that developed an Atomic desktop for schools.
I was involved in the original rollout for Chromebooks for schools and I’m very disappointed at where that stands today.
I’m in the US and there’s 31,000 chromebooks in my county alone but business and universities are disposing of tons of usable laptops that could be repurposed.
I remain reasonably convinced that STEM leaning student organizations can take Cockpit, write a plugin for it, and start to build an OSS chromebook competitor. It’s about the management of those systems, which is mostly a solved problem with the cloud tech Atomic is building off anyway.
Then every kid has linux and a full container runtime out of the box, wouldn’t that be something.
I don’t believe it needs to be easier for people new to Fedora. If non-Atomic Fedora is so-easily broken for new users, why would I have confidence in the distro as a whole?
I don’t know what new users are doing on Fedora installs, but I don’t like containers, Flatpaks, or these other layers of abstraction that people are leaning towards nowadays with Linux. I want a Linux distro focusing on providing a good experience, not putting up roadblocks to my own local, physical system. I don’t want a distro focusing on what I call toys to appease new people.
However, I’m clearly not the target audience of Atomic/immutable distros or this new-user push. RH seems to love containers. I understand the reasons, but it looks like Fedora and RH aren’t for me anymore. If new users and enough existing users want it, it’s a good move.
We are talking about a default here, if something is easier for new users why should fedora not make it the default? I also don’t think anyone claimed that non-atomic fedora is easily broken. Having an even more resilient system sounds only positive to me.
I believe that everyone is trying to improve fedora, nobody is deliberately putting up roadblocks or creating unneeded abstractions. If you disagree with what some people are doing, explain why you think it is a bad idea with well-reasoned arguments.
Also note that normal fedora won’t go away, this thread is just about the default experience.
A default gets the most focus. I’m certain most Fedora downloads by a long-shot currently are of Workstation that’s presented as-default.
With Atomic as the default, more people will use it, and over-time it’ll surpass non-Atomic editions. All of that has more bug reports, developers responding to them, and QA prioritizing it; all of which is great for the Atomic edition, while leaving everything else with less-eyes, slowing down user reports, and thus dev and QA focus.
I believe non-Atomic Workstation currently provides a good experience, and want as many eyes and dev focus towards improving that. Atomic nor any other immutable distro has presented me any benefit to want to try them, and thus I don’t recommend them, and I believe new users need to come into traditional familiar territory for troubleshooting from others; nobody else notable is offering immutable as-default, and I trust non-Atomic Fedora and Linux in-general enough to not break in such a non-recoverable way to make Atomic/immutable worthwhile.
I’ve only seen Atomic/immutable advertised as making systems less-breakable. I used Linux largely since 2015 and don’t understand why that has to even be a thing outside of specialized hardware and environments.
I believe it encourages bad troubleshooting habits.
Anyone can break their OS and roll it back or have it protected by whatever Atomic does. But there goes the experience of actually figuring out what went wrong to begin with, or the details of what specifically you shouldn’t repeat. It’s like the difference between “Something went wrong” and “For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log”.
I believe it’s also distro lock-in (nobody else does immutable; new users will get used to it, and have a hard time on other non-immutable distros), followed by more distros adapting to it also for popularity contests, all the while still not convincing me of an actual benefit.
My concern is basically seeing more focus towards Atomic instead of non-Atomic traditional Linux, and I don’t want to see that shift because Atomic (nor anything Containers) hasn’t convinced me it’s worth using. I’d prefer as-much dev work as possible be focused towards what I’m using so that what I use can improve quicker
in a diferent thread someone said they use homebrew and I thought that was clever, thought I don’t yet understand the Atomic model well enough to apprciate the nuance between dnf install
and brew install
(other that the package format, of course).
I want to add, for anyone interested:
Fedora Atomic is very insecure. Privilege escalation through catching the sudo/pkexec password is easy, as .bashrc and user PATH are writable even to many Flatpaks.
But rpm-ostree allows all wheel users (which they are by default) to do arbitrary changes to the OS.
I am happy if people sign this change proposal, it is my first one
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/better-rpm-ostree-permissions