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I just wanted to say that the “Keeping Fedora Ship-Shape” article was absolutely incredible. I personally think that most desktop Linux distros don’t have enough in the way of regular updates, nor do they have a proper mechanism for keeping software current. Your article proves that someone really is doing something to get Linux on the desktop.

Since the article appeared, I have reinstalled two of my four boxes with Fedora Core 2, and now have them running the latest and greatest kernels and software. I even plugged in DAG (http://dag.wieers.com/packages/apt/) and was able to pull down all of my favorite not-included-in-the-distro software.

This is a really long winded way of saying thanks. So… Thanks.

I agree with the main point of the December 2004 “Shutdown” column: it is the applications that matter. An operating system is pointless without applications. To wit, just look at all of the applications that Microsoft and Apple bundle “for free” with their commercial operating systems. Similarly, Linux is fairly useless without bash, Apache, Samba, Firefox, KDE, GNOME, and so on.

However, I find the conclusion of the column flawed. Open source and free software aren’t about ease-of-use and convenience. They’re about freedom: freedom to choose, freedom to change, and the freedom to control ultimately how the chips and circuits inside your computers act. Forsaking Linux to move to Mac OS X is no different from…

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