Fedora Planning Ahead For The Next 5 Years

[cynic]

Thanks! Most people here will hate me for saying that but I believe it's not only necessary, it should be opt-out not opt-in and be installed by default. It would have helped Linux development immensely.

if you want an OS that collect hundreds os metrics about what you do and what you install let's go and use Windows.

And, btw: don't forget to come here again to report how much it benefits from all that data it collected.

[mether]

Did anyone else see the part concerning spins and remixes? It said "It's trivial to create and maintain a new spin or remix...". I don't imagine it's trivial to the person or persons creating and maintaining it.

You are quoting a goal, not the current state. Having said that, it is fairly easy to create and maintain a spin or remix (I have done both; it just takes a kickstart file via the image creation tool) by itself. What is more involved is all the packaging and qa work but that isn't specific to the spin. If there are tooling improvements that makes it easier to understand the end state specific to the spin and test it, that could be a net positive.

[alcalde]

"Fedora is for everyone"
"Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns"

There is no legal concerns. Never in the history of this planet has anyone been sued over this and everyone else does it in broad daylight with no consequence. If there was a concern they could just, you know, go to the appropriate patent holder and ASK THEM.

[mirmirmir]

There is no legal concerns. Never in the history of this planet has anyone been sued over this and everyone else does it in broad daylight with no consequence. If there was a concern they could just, you know, go to the appropriate patent holder and ASK THEM.

Aah yes, I love to take legal advice from random forum member on internet...

[mattdm]

Thanks, this perfectly explains why Fedora/RedHat cannot ship Mesa with HW acceleration for patented codecs although ... I'm not so sure they have over 100K users which exempts them from any responsibility and royalties. In fact I'm quite sure they have a lot fewer active installations. According to various polls and distrowatch data Fedora is barely in top 10 of most popular Linux distros and all the Linux distros combined have maybe ~10 to 20 million users. Maybe RedHat just wants to avoid any possible issues.

We do not do per-system tracking, but we have some basic data on the number of systems getting updates from our mirrors weekly. (It's anyone's guess how many systems fall outside of that (disabled checking for updates, disabled the "countme" flag, using a private mirror, etc.). From what we observe, though, there are at least 200,000 systems running Fedora Workstation alone:
2023-02-12-fedora_updates_systems-timeseries-line-variant.png


All desktop variants (including "unspecified", which are either custom installs or those that have been upgraded since about 10 years ago — could be desktop!) sum to around 350k.

And this method only goes back to F32, and there's a good chunk of people running even older systems. (I expect not too many of those are desktops, but no way to really know).

[avis]

We do not do per-system tracking, but we have some basic data on the number of systems getting updates from our mirrors weekly. (It's anyone's guess how many systems fall outside of that (disabled checking for updates, disabled the "countme" flag, using a private mirror, etc.). From what we observe, though, there are at least 200,000 systems running Fedora Workstation alone:
2023-02-12-fedora_updates_systems-timeseries-line-variant.png


All desktop variants (including "unspecified", which are either custom installs or those that have been upgraded since about 10 years ago — could be desktop!) sum to around 350k.

And this method only goes back to F32, and there's a good chunk of people running even older systems. (I expect not too many of those are desktops, but no way to really know).

Wow, that's quite interesting, thanks a ton for the information. I'm not quite sure how you distinguish individual installations since clients don't send any unique data, so you can only see individual IP addressed which can hide more than a single installation behind them.

[mattdm]

Wow, that's quite interesting, thanks a ton for the information. I'm not quite sure how you distinguish individual installations since clients don't send any unique data, so you can only see individual IP addressed which can hide more than a single installation behind them.

It's quite clever, really. (I didn't invent it, so I can say that.) At least once per week, but no more than that, a request from each system includes a flag named "countme". That way, we can be reasonably sure that the weekly count is unique systems. (It isn't cryptographically secure, but we do some basic sanity checks of course.) The countme flag is set to 1 if the system is new, 2 if it's been around for 2-4 weeks, 3 for 5-24, and 4 for 25+ (~6 months). The request also includes some basic info from /etc/os-release, which is how I can distinguish Workstation from Cloud and release numbers.