But there is no moral commandment that "the user is more important." The goal of software is the goal of its developers; it's up to them. Someone very well could say, "this software is an exercise in intellectual purity." Or, "this software is to scratch the developers' particular itches, which may or may not be the same thing as satisfying most users."
Maybe Fedora in particular has a mission statement that says, "The user is most important," but I'm not aware of it. I'm certain that's not the case for the distro I use (Arch Linux) :-)
"Since its first version, in 2003, Red Hat's Fedora Linux has been the best place to track what's on the leading edge of Linux and open source software."
— Jason Brooks, eweek.com
"Fedora has [...] released an amazingly rock-solid operating system."
— Jack Wallen, TechRepublic.com
Are either of those quotes truly true if the developers are okay with breaking existing functionality?
I don't see it as "breaking existing functionality." I see it as "improving functionality." Albeit at the expense of Flash temporarily not working. Is it worthwile to pay that expense? For some software, yes, for some software, no. The point is that there is no solid rule here that is true for every software project ( in this case, every Linux distribution).
"Since its first version, in 2003, Red Hat's Fedora Linux has been the best place to track what's on the leading edge of Linux and open source software." — Jason Brooks, eweek.com
I personally would consider something like Arch Linux to be much more on the leading edge, and they would definitely not hesitate to improve their software at the expense of something possibly not working on somebody's system until they get the new update.
Case in point: Arch Linux was the first to switch to Python 3 from Python 2. A long time after that probably should have happened everywhere. And everybody whined a lot about how it was "too soon" and lots of software would break. Personally, I haven't had any problems with that transition on Arch Linux. Did it break things for some people, temporarily? Yes. Did it move forward the state of the Arch Linux operating system and, honestly, Python 3 adoption in general? Certainly yes.
If Linus had been on their forum yelling IT'S ALL ABOUT THE USER and telling people their attitude is stupid, maybe it wouldn't have happened. (Actually, he would have just gotten ostracized from the community.) In fact, they did get a huge amount of flak, but they stood up to it anyway.
Maybe Fedora in particular has a mission statement that says, "The user is most important," but I'm not aware of it. I'm certain that's not the case for the distro I use (Arch Linux) :-)