Comment by mattdm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattdm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Can you elaborate on LTS? Does my answer below about upgrade pain address your concern?

On font rendering, we are hampered in some areas by patents. We have made some adjustments starting with F24 (changes to the rendering and improvements to the default system font) which you might appreciate. Good news is that higher DPIs make some of those issues irrelevant, and we're working on good hiDPI support, so.... the future is looking up.

I appreciate that you like KDE, but that's a technology / environment rather than a problem/solution. What does KDE give you that you like?

On drivers, like any Linux distro, we're hampered by the difficulty in getting vendors to even care about us. Red Hat's hardware enablement teams _do_ put in a lot of effort here, and that work generally lands upstream in X/Wayland/kernel, and is enabled in Fedora quickly.

For enabling proprietary drivers without too much pain (while still supporting and promoting open source!)... we're working on ideas.

Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for responding! My concerns are (almost) all in the context of use in laptops.

1. LTS: In my experience, the issue that has caused most trouble is kernel version changes within a Fedora version. Why? Because drivers break. The laptop works fine just before the update. After the update, I get a blank screen. This has happened with different hardware, at least a dozen times in the last six years. CLI tweaking was needed every single time, to restore X or revert to a previous version. At other times, wi-fi no longer works after an update. At yet other times, random wake ups happen from sleep.

Maintaining the same kernel version (and associated stack) throughout a given Fedora release, in my humble opinion, can do wonders.

2. Font rendering: Yes, I realise that you have some patent issues. Please do the maximum that is legally possible. Fedora's font rendering hurts eyes after a few hours of work.

3. KDE: Desktop discussions can be subjective, of course! KDE's menu accelerators and accessibility help in minimising the need for trackpad/mouse use. In my laptop, KDE's responsiveness is uniform and smooth; GNOME experiences random freezes (Cinnamon has the same problem; so, I suspect it is GTK-specific). Also, on all of my laptops (HP, Dell), battery lasts noticeably longer under KDE.

4. Drivers: Yes, this is an Achilles' heel. Convenient installers for proprietary drivers go a long way in making the experience more pleasurable. Particularly, when we need to install, configure and support multiple laptops (including those of family).

Thanks, again, for soliciting feedback! I look forward to improvements on multiple fronts!

1. We're almost certainly going to keep the aggressive kernel updates. It's very expensive to maintain a long-term kernel fork with bugfixes, and users benefit from the constantly-rolling hardware enablement. That said, we are working on making automated testing of these updates better, so we can block ones with serious regressions. I think the experience you are describing is likely due to proprietary drivers not matching the new kernel; we have some work in flight to keep the old kernel the default if you have proprietary drivers installed and they aren't updated to match. (Except in the event of a critical security bug.)

2. Have you looked at the font changes in F24? What do you think?

3. I know the GNOME team is working on battery life. I haven't experienced random freezing, but for subjective responsiveness, I recommend the Impatience extension which shortens animation time https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/ (I've jokingly suggested we install this by default with a timer which shortens the animations the longer you have it installed.)

4. Thanks; I'll definitely consider that.

> we have some work in flight to keep the old kernel the default if you have proprietary drivers installed and they aren't updated to match

That is reasonable, and should reduce the number of such problems.

> Have you looked at the font changes in F24? What do you think?

Certainly better than earlier versions!

> I recommend the Impatience extension

I shall try that; thanks for the pointer.

Thanks, again, for the active conversation!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com