brent ... understand the bristling and squirmy bed of contradictions that is Fedora ...
Fedora provides a near-perfect case study of why Linux has not succeeded in the desktop market, in marked contrast to the way in which Linux has succeeded and come to dominate the server/cloud, IoT and mobile markets.
Fedora is inward-focused rather than mission-focused, in the sense that the Fedora community is focused on Fedora rather than on developing Fedora as a tool to facilitate a use case. Fedora is an OS that developed without a clear objective or focus, other than to develop Fedora.
Brent's review was something of a shock because Brent brought into focus a number of things that have been rattling around in the back of my head for several years, unarticulated. Without an objective, without a clear focus, Linux distros devolve into a mess of internal contradictions, however technically sound the components comprising the distro might be.
When Tovalds reflected on the future (or maybe non-future) of the Linux desktop in 2014, that's what he was talking about when he observed that the Linux desktop would not succeed in the consumer market unless and until the Linux desktop community developed the self-discipline to focus on the desktop use case, developing a handful of desktop-oriented distros and focused on quality rather than quantity.
When I came to Solus in 2017, Solus had a dual, but clear vision: (1) develop an innovative, efficient, modern OS Layer, using the best available Linux technologies, and (2) laser-focus on the needs of the "ordinary home desktop user", designing the distro around those needs and nothing else. It was that dual, but clear, focus that made Solus unique.
Brent's Fedora review brought the importance of that focus to mind.
