CentOS - Jul 2015 - Fedora change that will probably affect RHEL

Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
>>> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
>> Is that true, I wonder?
>> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
>> about their users (or what their users want).
> This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear that
> Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
> hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
> if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL and
> convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.
You (and others) are misunderstanding my off-the-cuff remark.
It was purely an observation about the lack of statistics.
I rarely if ever see a statement of the kind
  "Among Fedora users 37% use KDE and 42% Gnome".
Or (after the remark I was responding to)
  "83% of CentOS machines are in datacenters, and 7% are
home-servers".
(Or "x% of Fedora users have turned SELinux to permissive".)

I'm not saying that Fedora or CentOS should work on democratic principles.
I welcome Johnny Hughes unambiguous statement that CentOS follows RHEL.
This saves a lot of time arguing about things that cannot be changed.

But I hold the (old-fashioned?) view that before expressing an opinion
one should get the facts.




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin

On 07/29/2015 06:00 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>>>> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
>>>> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
> 
>>> Is that true, I wonder?
>>> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out
anything
>>> about their users (or what their users want).
> 
>> This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear
that
>> Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
>> hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
>> if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL
and
>> convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.
> 
> You (and others) are misunderstanding my off-the-cuff remark.
> It was purely an observation about the lack of statistics.
> I rarely if ever see a statement of the kind
>   "Among Fedora users 37% use KDE and 42% Gnome".
> Or (after the remark I was responding to)
>   "83% of CentOS machines are in datacenters, and 7% are
home-servers".
> (Or "x% of Fedora users have turned SELinux to permissive".)
> 
> I'm not saying that Fedora or CentOS should work on democratic
principles.
> I welcome Johnny Hughes unambiguous statement that CentOS follows RHEL.
> This saves a lot of time arguing about things that cannot be changed.
> 
> But I hold the (old-fashioned?) view that before expressing an opinion
> one should get the facts.
We can't gather facts about people .. people go bat shit crazy if their
machines report stuff back.

At CentOS, we can't even tell you how many users we have, because we
can't possibly buy all the mirrors that are required to give out updates
to all users.

Instead, we have a couple hundred mirrors JUST to distribute CentOS to
external mirrors run by the community (currently 624 mirrors in 85
countries) when we do a release.  We don't have the ability to gather
statistics on servers we don't own.

Fedora is in the same boat.


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On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 06:20:44AM -0500, Johnny Hughes
wrote:
> > You (and others) are misunderstanding my off-the-cuff remark.
> > It was purely an observation about the lack of statistics.
> > I rarely if ever see a statement of the kind
> >   "Among Fedora users 37% use KDE and 42% Gnome".
> > Or (after the remark I was responding to)
> >   "83% of CentOS machines are in datacenters, and 7% are
home-servers".
> > (Or "x% of Fedora users have turned SELinux to permissive".)
> > 
> > I'm not saying that Fedora or CentOS should work on democratic
principles.
> > I welcome Johnny Hughes unambiguous statement that CentOS follows
RHEL.
> > This saves a lot of time arguing about things that cannot be changed.
> > 
> > But I hold the (old-fashioned?) view that before expressing an opinion
> > one should get the facts.
> 
> We can't gather facts about people .. people go bat shit crazy if their
> machines report stuff back.
> 
> At CentOS, we can't even tell you how many users we have, because we
> can't possibly buy all the mirrors that are required to give out
updates
> to all users.
> 
> Instead, we have a couple hundred mirrors JUST to distribute CentOS to
> external mirrors run by the community (currently 624 mirrors in 85
> countries) when we do a release.  We don't have the ability to gather
> statistics on servers we don't own.
> 
> Fedora is in the same boat.
Yeah, pretty much, although I might be less... direct about the
language. :) We are very sensitive to user privacy concerns. And
gathering this kind of information accurately in other ways is
expensive.

I can tell you some ad hoc numbers from F21, which come with tons of
caveats. This is based on ISO download numbers from the master mirror,
which is very imprecise and does not reflect installations ? someone
might have downloaded the cloud image once and installed a million
nodes. Or downloaded it a million times and never actually booted it.
But, anyway, from this:

 * About 70% Fedora Workstation (our GNOME-based desktop primarily
    targetted at software developers and technical users.)
 * About 20% Fedora Server
 * About  5% Fedora Cloud
 * About 2% KDE Desktop Spin
 * About 2% Xfce Desktop Spin
 * About 1% other spins and images

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader