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OSNews Rates Fedora Core 1 Mild Disappointment
JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."
... I mean how many distributions are perfect, the first time around. RHN is available up until April, which gives them a bit of time to sot things out, if they're expecting a big migration from RH to fedora...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The community of dedicated bug reporters/developers has largely shifted to Debian. Most users of RH/Fedora don't want to file a bug report when they find one. They want it to be fixed long before they ever have the chance to find it. I know a lot of people who use RH, and none of them are inclined to file bug reports. The bulk of technical Debian users run unstable, and submit bug reports as often as they encounter problems. I think the reality of the situation is that the strength of the community isn't in RedHat any longer.
It's something from RedHat. RedHat has had problems since the dark ages with x.0 releases, which is what Fedora basically is.
I'm having code compile issues because of the new linking setup myself. Code the compiled perfectly under RHL 9 blows up on FC1.... Can't say I didn't expect this to be a problem free migration. Reminds me of when RH first kicked out the glib updates... Code all over the place blew up left and right until everything else started updating.
Another thumbs down from Eugenia Loli-Queru. This from the person who gave a sorta-review of Suse based on screen shots. Give me a break. Sorry for the flames but I stopped reading OSNews long ago because of her half assed ramblings. Let Ars or something get ahold of Fedora and then I'll know Im getting a well thought out review... good or bad. Next...
Have a Happy.
Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me.
I have never had any trouble finding pre-compiled binaries for gaim. Not when I was running SuSE, not now that I'm running Mandrake.
But no, I was wrong. You, with your two hours of NetHack, you have brought me to the light. It's back to Windows for me. Thank you, oh gods of astroturf.
My interpretation? Not having software installed != usability issues. Last time I checked, Windows didn't come with a compiler installed either... and to run AIM, you had to install pre-compiled binaries. But Linux must be unusable if your demo CD doesn't have everything you ever wanted to use pre-installed.
Doofus. Seriously. Your logic sucks ass. Think before you troll^W^W^W^W^W post, OK?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
> since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them.
That was kinda my impression of RH9, for that matter.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me."
Don't brush off criticism like that. Whether he's trolling or not, this "no no it works just fine!" attitude is one of the reasons I don't want to switch to Linux. I don't like being treated like a lying asshole because I have a problem with a solution that's disgustingly obvious to everybody who's climbed the Linux learning curve.
"Derp de derp."
First, AOL's Linux version of AIM bites. Its unavoidable --- you have to understand which apps are popular for what. Its the same in Windows, its just that you already have experience with it, so you know that you should use Winzip or whatever.
Second, why were you trying to compile? SuSE has binaries of gaim. Just start up YaST, go to the installer, and install the gaim program.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's strange to me how everyone is jumping on RedHat about Fedora. First how RedHat "abandoned the community" when they EOL'ed RedHat Linux, and how crying betrayal because what amounts to the 1.0 release of a new distribution has a few bugs? Take a breath, folks!
Fedora represents a shift to a new development model which is more community centric; of COURSE there are going to be problems with the 1.0 release. Is that a reason to bag the whole thing and declare it dead? Please!
I'm running Fedora 1.0 on a couple of machines. While there are a couple of quirks, I'd say that overall it's a fine distribution, and an improvement from RH 9.0. I'm certainly going to give it more than a week before I condemn the whole project! Meantime I'm going to reflect on the fact, that people seem to like to forget, that the whole OSS community owes a debt of gratitude to RedHat. RedHat has consistently failed to live up to conspiracy theories about "betraying the community".
you site "a lot people you know" who dont file reports as conclusive proof of your assertion, but thats weak. where are the numbers, friend. i know lots of people, in person and on mailing lists i frequent who are jumping to use fedora *and* file bug reports whenever they can.
I count this more of a troll than what it's replying to.
Strike 1: Pre-compiled binaries. Two words which mean nothing to the average windows user.
Strike 2: Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me. etc. An asshole atittude instead of trying to offer the least bit help. Most people who've seeked assistance on an IRC channel is used to this.
Strike 3: Last time I checked, Windows didn't come with a compiler...M/i> For average Windows functioning, no compiler is needed. However for many basic operations in *nix, one is needed. Many programs are not distributed in binary, including drivers which are often required before the OS can even go online. Without a compiler being provided by the distro, the situation becomes irritating.
Strike 4: Doofus Insulting the potential *nix user. That's right, wonder for years about why no one switches, then when someone tries, insult them.
People, try to remember that the alternative environment is so mindblowing that problems which appear easy to you are brick walls to others.
.. I must respond ........ :)
.. and you want to try out WinXP on your computer.. There is no LiveEval version .. so you have to backup everything in your previous setup, install a copy of the new OS, sit through atleast an hour long OS install (if not longer) + download and find all of the apps to finish out the install (easily another hour if you have done it before) just to try it out..
So lemme get this straight.. you grab a SuSE LiveEval CD and are able to boot up, use it, play a game, toy around with the interface and decide within two hours that Linux is not right for you and are able to boot back to your previous OS without any distruption.
I am surprised that Windows people don't find this simply amazing. Seriously. Lets say you were running umm.. Win98 or W2k
Don't like it? Hehehe.. good luck getting back to your previous system.
In anycase, there are a lot of people that try out Linux and do not really seem to have a REASON to switch over. As a result (as in your case) there was absolutely NO effort to try and find out what differences there are between the two systems. You expected to boot into Linux and have essentially a Windows knock-off.
Needless to say, it takes much more than 2 hours to really understand a new system and start to really appreciate its unique features (and yes, a KDE based FOSS OS/distro has a LOT of great features) but for most people, there is a lack of acknowledgement on how long it truly took them to master their current OS due to the simple fact that MOST started out on some Windows variant and gathered knowledge over a long period of time.
A small disclaimer: I haven't yet upgraded by RH9 boxes to FC1, so I might end up reaching the same conclusion, but I can already see a bunch of red flags in that "review".
The box I'm typing on now began its life running Red Hat 4.2. It's been upgraded countless number of times, and it's now on Red Hat 9. And it's rock-stable solid. And the reason that it's stable, and functional, is precisely because what I've been doing, for the last six years, was the exact opposite of what this "review"er did.
Notice that she began having problems when she tried to hack together an upgrade to some application. Lesson number one when running Red Hat: do not install any software yourself. Always use rpm, which checks in, keeps track of, and maintains, all the inter-library and inter-application dependencies. Once you begin flinging random libraries and applications into the system, some of which may or may not overwrite existing libraries or files, you're well on your merry way to Linux's equivalent of Windows DLL hell, when you've got ten versions of the same basic library installed in fifteen different directories, and you now have absolutely no clue whatsoever what you end up running when you start a given application. Which randomly crashes, I wonder why?
By the way, the same also applies to other Linux distros too, I'm sure. They all use some kind of a package management system, be it rpm or apt. The same principle applies in either case.
My box is very solid even though I have plenty of custom software installed which I've compiled and built myself. But the key difference is that all the software was installed by rpm. Rach time I upgraded to a new distribution release, the installer correctly detected that I have an application that has a dependency on an older version of the library. The installer then proceeds to load a compatibility library, in addition to the new, incompatible version of the library. After upgrading, I then recompile all my custom software and install the new RPMs, whenever I have some free time. Everything still works in the meantime, because all the dependencies are correctly satisfied.
Eventually, I get around to cleaning out my box, seeing which compatibility libraries can be removed. When I try to remove them, inevitable RPM complains because I forgot to recompile some application that still depends on the old library. After doing that, and when nothing no longer needs it, it gets removed by rpm without a peep.
I also see that the reviewer grabbed some random third-party RPM from some dark alley (strike 1). Unsurprisingly, rpm refused to install it due to missing dependencies (strike 2). The reviewer tried to fix the situation by, once again, grabbing a bunch of third party libraries, and installing them manually (strike 3). End result: a big, recursive mess (strike 4).
I wonder why?
Sheesh, what exactly are the qualification to be an "OS reviewer", these days???
I, for one, wouldn't consider someone with a problem to be lying or an asshole. I've had plenty of problems with linux, and have clawed my way up the learning curve slowly but surely, and I still don't consider myself to have everything `working'.
But all things considered, I'm happy with my current setup. I don't use XP for anything except to boot up if I need to call my ISP for support (they don't know how to help you if you're using linux). But that's just me.
(Warning: Gentoo plug)To be honest, I didn't have a distro that really did 90% of what I wanted until I tried Gentoo. It's a little arcane to begin with, but their documentation *rocks* and I think I learned more in the three days it took me to set up my system :) than I had in the five or six months I had messed around with redhat.
I don't know, I guess I'm just saying that trolls or zealots with screwed up attitudes shouldn't prevent you from switching to linux. Someone switches to linux (I'm thinking desktop) when they can make it do what they want it to, and not before.... IMHO.
philcrissman.com.
Good thing you don't have a DELL with the LG CD drive, or you would be whining about how 9.2 killed your machine.
If you have to be a 0-day upgrader, you take your chances!
Just how did RedHat give you the shaft by asking to be paid for their support? You still get the OS for free. I don't understand the leach mentality of the underside of OSS. Give something back, or STFU! Leaches like you are the reason why windows maintains its dominance in the marketplace.
Eugh. The reviewer gets his hands on a distro with out of the box yum and apt support, and then has troubles because he's trying to build an application from unpackages source? He could have done a `yum install gaim' `apt-get install gaim' or `up2date -i gaim' and fetched all the right dependencies.
Or grabbed the source package and rebuilt it with his customizations.
"Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole --literally-- usability fiasco."
They wouldn't think anything, cause they wouldn't compile their software, much less do it in the same half assed way the reviewer did. They might complain that yum needs a good GUI frontend through, or up2date needs a better one. Which would be fair, as opposed to this review.
They'd also read the documentation that comes with VMWare and realize that VMWare's Samba server can indeed interfere with an existing Samba server. That isn't a Fedora problem, its a `I didn't real the VMWare documentation'.
There's packages of every multimedia app available at the FreshRPMs repository network. We don't need his xxms-mp3, we especially don't need it as an unpackaged tarball.
He has some valid points: the OSS driver for those yamaha sound cards does indeed suck. ALSA is a much better idea and its time Fedora / Red Hat included it by default. Packages are available on Freshrpms though.
Mike
I have enjoyed using Red Hat for years. I'm glad they are making money in the Corporate world. However the recent statement that Red Hat made that Linux wasn't ready for the home user is a self fulfulling prophecy in their case. I do more than test new releases on my home Linux system - I do my checking, scan records for retention, email, word processing - everything I used to do on Windows. I really won't use a Linux which I can't get security patches for. I won't install a new Fedora every three months to be able to download security fixes. Why would anyone work to report bugs and gather documentation to get them fixed if they can never use the product for more than testing? Red Hat has no home desktop linux to sell and Fedora is not a home desktop Linux distro. I'm moving to Mandrake 9.2 where I can at least get the security fixes for 18 months.I'm not mad or bitter its just Red hat no longer has a home linux distro.
I really don't think subscribing to a mailing list should have to be a pre-requisite for installing & properly using a modern OS and I think her article reflects that belief as well. I think it's valid to point out that a number of the issues she came across simply worked out of the box with both Windows XP & Mac OS X. If you care about desktop useability one of the things to strive for is to just have things work out of the box without having to refer to google or mailing list archives etc...
Non-enterprise RedHat fit the bill perfectly for small sites, but SuSE might be too expensive given the lack of a download-only release. I'd assume IBM was hoping Fedora might be a good substitute for non-enterprise RedHat, but if not, which way will they turn?
It would behoove IBM to support a community distro that they can have some influence over and that won't disappear randomly. That influence comes simply by helping out to improve it as needed to better meet their customers' needs. Debian is the largest, most mature, and most professional effort. It would therefore be the most logical way to turn at this stage.
Goddamn that is a smooth troll! But what the hell, I'll reply anyway...
Considering the manpower that Red Hat has devoted to Fedora (Which has gone UP vs. RHL), and the fact that they're trying to get "the community" involved more, this could actually be a good thing for Red Hat users.
They're not abandoning the enthusiast market, they've just spun it off into a not-for-profit so they can write off what isn't making them money. Think of it as RedHat Edge.
... And so it comes to this.
> Here's a hint, if you're the kind of .71 to .72 right after you
> person that worries about moving from
> gaim
> install your distribution, then Fedora
> probably is not for you. Or you could
> wait until updated RPMs hit the
> official repositories instead of
> grabbing Joe Bob's RPM build and
> wondering why your installation
> exploded.
Just run Windows, and your installation won't explode when you install third party software.