Comments on: Red Hat: Fedora will engage customers

Firm says it snubbed early adopters when it shifted attention to business-focused version of Linux. It hopes to make amends with Fedora.

[FocusedWolf]

Fedora is great...but i just wish Nvidia would make drivers that work!

One only needs to take a glimpse of the nvidia linux forum to see all the complaints of instability when the latest drivers are installed against our vid cards http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14

Also this problem does not affect Fedora alone...

I just hope Nvidia gets these problems sorted out.

Nvidia's making the same mistake as RH

If you were using a standard modern distribution
with a standard kernel, you would find nvidia's
drivers work perfectly. Seriously, try it --
run the latest fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, whatever
using the kernel that comes with the distro.
You will get excellent performance and zero
hassles.

Where NVidia fails is with the enthusiasts. For
example on one of my machines I'm running
2.6.11-rc3. This is not yet compatible with
nvidia and so I'm back to running nv. And this
is by no means the first time the kernel I'm
running is too new to work with nvidia. The 2.6
series, 4k stacks, SELinux, they all broke
NVidia.

Eventually those features became mainstream and
about that time nvidia modified their drivers to
work with them.

Another problems I have with nvidia is on a
different computer. For various reasons, mostly
relating to power consumption and noise, I have
a G4 based server rather than an x86 based one.
That machine cannot run the nvidia drivers at
all because they're binary only and so I have to
go with ATI.

For ordinary users this is not a problem, but
for enthusiasts it means use nvidia = have
problems. RedHat has had exactly the same thing
with fedora (and it sounds like they've _just_
realised it). They saw that the real dollars
were away from the enthusiast market and
embraced the dollars. Fair enough, but if you
alienate the enthusiasts then support for your
product support will be fickle.

Will nvidia learn the same lesson? Who knows.
Maybe the 2.8 process will get enough enthusists
sick of them that nvidia notices the problem, or
maybe not...
They're helped considerably by a lack of
compertition -- ATI's binary drivers are worse,
and ATI's open source drivers are behind nvidia
at this point. Also, ATI concentrates on
directX while nvidia concentrates on opengl and
all linux apps (including linux emu. of windows
games) use opengl. So even if the ATI drivers
improve, they'll be hard pressed to beat nvidia.

problems with fedora leave serious concerns about red hat

To be honest, my experience with fedora core linux is that it doesn't work; there are more features than competing distributions, but most of those features don't work. I use Debian, and gentoo, I've dablled with suse and mandrake, and others. I'd say that by not allowing free distribution of their enterprise product, red-hat has hurt it's source: linux. linux should always be linux, red-hat is differenctiating itself from linux, and I think that's bot a bad business move for them, and a good reason I won't deploy RHEL on any network I administer. I'd rather carefully build a stock debian, slackware, or gentoo image that install something that's not really true open source, since I can't really try before I buy. I have to buy to try.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

RHEL not good value

We bought RHEL for our site and it costs a fortune. From shell, type chfn and hit enter. Segmentation Violation. What exactly are we paying for?

RHEL is not for you.

RHEL is for users who have heard that throwing
'linux' at their computing problem will make it
reliable. They are the PHBs of your nightmares.

Now, fair enough, those people weren't being
targetted by any other distros despite being the
players with the serious cash. The fact that a
binary-identical version exists for thousands
less does not interest these people. RH has gone
after them with what most people consider to be
a fairly good product.

For people who understand that RH just brands
linux, there are plenty of distributions to
choose from. Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo
even, Ubuntu, etc. Find what suits you and go
nuts.

Solaris??

I would be stunned if solaris makes a measurable
dent in RedHat's community. I expect most of
the disinfranchised RH users have swapped to
SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu or Gentoo rather
than solaris.

Talk about a head-faked PR move

I was one of those many programmers/testers who felt rather let down by their decision to drop RHL for their Enterprise Business Model (the money maker). It was disappointing and dismaying, leaving you displeased with their executive decision makers. Now, to read this head-fake towards contrition... let's say I'm perfectly content with my my new programming OS [suse].

Fool me once...

Shame on you. Fool me twice; Shame on me.

I was a loyal Redhat customer. I subscribed to their excellent customer support service and used it on several desktop and server computers. Then, one day, Redhat said that they didn't want me for a customer and that they would keep the money I had paid (the remainder of my one year subscriptions) and I was just out of luck. They ripped me off and said that if I wanted to be their customer I had to start paying a huge fee.

Do you think any of their old customers is ever going to trust them again?

I was forced to leave my comfortable Redhat nest and look for another distribution. And what did I find? I found that Debian/Testing has better support, for free, than I Redhat gave me for cold hard cash. It is easier to install. Easier to manage software upgrades. And, more reliable.

BTW: for those complaining about the nVidia drivers. The bad ones didn't make it into Debian/Testing, I have had zero problems with nVidia drivers since moving to Debian/Testing.

Bob Pendleton

So what.....

I have moved on to Debian and Suse.