

Alan Cox – Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen - giis
https://plus.google.com/111104121194250082892/posts/aCiB7kTLXTh

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dschiptsov
The problem is - they are keeping adding unnecessary stuff to just keep going,
regardless of whether it is better, rational or not.

All those replacement of classic shell-script-based start-up tools, adding
countless "managers" and "buses" and "services" and "settings daemons" just
makes the whole thing worse.

It is like MS or SAP - keep producing bigger and bigger bloatware until there
are no more suckers to buy it.

Piling up meaningless stuff is not just a Linux distro problem. It is also in
languages (look at CL or R6RS) and libraries. Almost everywhere, especially in
non-CS world.)

The more sane approach is, surprise! of BSD systems. They have an OS and a
system of packages made out of ports of OSS software. They keep the core OS
stable, sane, and without unnecessary, unreasonable changes. CenOS also has
some additional repositories, but it is basically a polished Fedora anyway.

~~~
davidhollander
> _All those replacement of classic shell-script-based start-up tools_

In case you are referring to the introduction of systemd, I'll mention that
Arch Linux has also made the switch, and away from the BSD style in doing so.
None of my Arch installs became unstable or slower and the reasons explained
for the switch seemed rational:
<https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530>

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dmckeon
Here's a more detailed description:
<http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-18-kde.html>

~~~
pan69
This made me laugh out loud (in regards to the installer):

"You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and
anything that is sane and safe in this most important of software
configuration steps."

~~~
aw3c2
It describes the thing perfectly. If you have an hour or so and like to
cringe, I can only recommend trying that abomination of installer software in
a VM. If only as a nice guide to find UI/UX problems by being shown perfect
examples of what not to do.

~~~
rwmj
Unfortunately I pointed out and filed bugs for many of these during
development, but they were ignored ...

~~~
giis
I had seen this also,I filed a bug ,they waited till the version reached End-
of-Life and closed bugs asking me to reopen the issue,if it exists with latest
version. I see lot of bug closed like this.That's bad.

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EwanToo
It's kind of sad to see the "What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing
A Project" and "I'm Sorry" stories just above this one, where Alan Cox
essentially says his former colleagues have released an unusable distribution.

~~~
crazytony
Unlike the posters in the other article, Alan isn't blindly commenting about
some knee-jerk visceral reaction to one developer's approach to solving a
problem. Nor is he blindly joining the agitprop bandwagon.

He's taken the code (mainstream distro) and tried to use it. He found a couple
bugs. He even tried work around those bugs only to be thwarted by even more
bugs. All the while he's explaining what's going wrong and why he's upset. His
reaction to the bugs is entirely appropriate given his past experience with
Fedora: their (RH's) build quality is slipping.

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RexRollman
I think the real problems is that, instead of working to create a good version
of Unix, many people are more concerned with creating Windows and Mac clones.
Sadly, this is creating complexity that isn't really needed.

~~~
wildranter
Affirming that is essentially the same as saying that both platforms achieved
their respective market shares by accident. However, I understand your point.
Linux is a great infrastructure OS, and investing resources in anything other
than that is pure waste.

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muyuu
Debian stable or FreeBSD.

Everybody else seems to be losing the plot. Well, I bet Slackware and Puppy
continue to work just fine.

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dkhenry
For what its worth. All my Fedora 18 Upgrades have been smooth and the desktop
works greats great. Its been working so well I even upgraded all my servers
from fc16.

~~~
giis
I faced issues when upgraded from Fedora-17. First it failed with message like
"GPG key retrieval failed:" which was fixed when i added '--nogpgcheck' Then
it displayed conflict message with existing django.f17 package.I removed that
package and finally upgrade worked.

~~~
dkhenry
SO you did actually remind me of one of the issues I did have which was the
--nogpgcheck, but I already knew that was coming because I didn't bother to
download the rpmfusion GPG key. It is annoying that fedora doesn't acknowledge
that most people will be using rpmfusion and plan for that in the upgrade
instructions.

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rbsn
I'm sorry but being a little naive, but what is the big issue with Fedora 18?
I moved to Fedora 18 from Ubuntu 12.10 because it was so awfully buggy. Every
other time I turned on my laptop I would get a black screen with an error
message. Another reason were the Amazon search results in Unity.

In comparison, Fedora 18 is superb.

~~~
rjbond3rd
I do (perversely) use Fedora to see where RHEL is going longer-term, and 18
has been really rough for me so far. Not impossible, just demoralizing.

Is the installer buggy, or just un-usably confusing? It's both. Sometimes the
"submit" type of button is waaaay down in the lower right (e.g., "Continue",
and sometimes it's in the upper left ("Done"). Modals are not differentiated
from full screens.

Forget customized partitioning -- I tried everything I could and never got it
to fully accept my very ordinary partitioning choices. An exercise in
frustration.

To summarize, it feels like a thick, hard-to-remove layer of dysfunctional GUI
gunk has been added needlessly, and it's time-consuming trial and error to
remove to get back to something more tolerably vanilla (e.g., dig into grub,
remove "rhgb quiet" and keep stripping things off until it's clean enough).
And that's just the aesthetic stuff.

The xfce and lxde spins are vastly better but give fewer options for, e.g.,
little systray widgets, so I feel conky (really jurassic but lovable old pre-
DE widget) is required.

If someone is looking for a "just works" distro, I'd recommend Crunchbang.
Personally, I'll continue to work through the F18 issues and file bugs, but
the problems are more philosophical than technical per se.

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Nux
He should stick to Fedora 17 until the next version which will likely be less
buggy.

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ck2
redhat is not exactly known for desktop

\- rhel/centos for server environment is an entirely different animal

~~~
giis
Its true Redhat not known for desktops,but lot of users use fedora as their
desktop. Recent versions of Fedora getting more and more difficult to
use,especially things like systemd or gnome-3x.Many users complaint about this
but nothing changed.

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olgeni
What's an initrd and why do I need one?

~~~
drcube
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initrd>

The one I have tells my kernel how to boot into my encrypted drive. It is also
necessary for RAID, LVM, and NFS root filesystems, loading special modules and
drivers before booting, and loading swap back into memory after hibernation.

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jiggy2011
Apparently people still say "pr0n" in 2013.

