On Sunday, December 15, 2019 7:38:43 PM MST Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr <joh...@splentity.com> said: > > > As explained earlier in this thread, DVD drives are still a standard > > offering on prebuilt systems. In fact, I just checked, and they're a > > standard offering on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are > > RHEL certified. > > The number of Dell workstations sold from a "RHEL certified" list is > miniscule compared to the number of PC-class computers sold. It's > possible that some "RHEL certified" requirement includes an optical > drive (I have no idea, since I didn't even know there was a "RHEL > certified" Dell, and I buy a lot of Dells). Also, what one vendor does > for one particular class of workstation is far from representative of > all prebuilt systems.
To clarify, I already had that info rattling around, so I decided to throw it out to specify. I think "RHEL certified" just means they sent a system of that model to Red Hat, and one of Red Hat's engineers checked to see if everything has a working kernel module to support it, or paid Red Hat to throw their name behind it one way or another. Regardless, it's the Dell systems that are "designed to run GNU/Linux". That those systems are a relatively small number is precisely why I later checked Walmart and Best Buy's offerings, you can read my findings on that earlier in the thread, but whether or not it had an optical drive seemed to depend heavily on the range it was in (low range systems especially seemed to have them). > I just checked my local Best Buy's website - of the desktop computer > models available in the store, only about 1/3 of them have an optical > drive. Only two out of sixty notebooks have an optical drive. I think > that's a lot more representative of where the market is going. While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's not representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support far more than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite as much as Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early UEFI firmware, which doesn't support USB boot. > My home computer still has an optical drive, only because the drive > still works 10 years after I bought it (or at least it did last time I > used it, which IIRC was maybe early this year). If I try to use the > drive and it doesn't work, I won't replace it. However, last time I > tried to burn something (a couple of years ago?), all the blank media on > my shelf was no longer any good, so I just gave someone an old thumb > drive (cheaper than buying more media). This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs Fedora. Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because their OS is randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have been prone to do in Fedora recently. I still use an X200 Tablet as my daily driver, which is a Core 2 Duo system from 2008. I also have a ThinkPad T400, which, using the default boot firmware, cannot boot from USB. (Though I use blobless Coreboot, where that's not an issue). -- John M. Harris, Jr. Splentity _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
