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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."
Although is not RedHat Linux 10, its pretty good for a v1.0 ... 1.1 or 2 should be pretty kick ass.. at least I hope..
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
Why were you trying to compile things when using a binary distribution?
This is why people like me were bitching about Red hat's shift in focus.
Sure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be all but bulletproof and stable, but what about those of us who aren't using linux to displace Solaris or NT Servers?
What about those of us who want to do a little Gimping or serve our home LANs? At the risk of drawing the fire of the distro zealots, this is the precise reason why I switched to Mandrake at about the same time as RHAT's IPO.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I am using Fedora right now to write this comment. While some of the bugs mentioned in the article are valid points, I have no problems with multimedia playback, using yum and rpm.livna.org to download mplayer, xine and xmms-mp3 was quite painless. Perhaps the author should have subscribed to the fedora mailing list before he tried the distro. The RPM problem has been fixed, installation of ATI 3D drivers was painless.
I just want to give a big THANK YOU to the whole Fedora team. The release had its problems but I am happy with my setup!
Uh... yeah right, so this is my signature.
But I wish there were more people writing distro reviews. OSNews seems to be one of the few sources that get any play on here, ( heck, they may be one of the few sources full stop ), and it would be nice if we could get some variety of opinion / requirements / analysis from a variety of different viewpoints.
The gaming, productivity and utility software industries have hundreds of review sites spanning all over the web, and while I recognise that individual distro releases rarely represent as big a market impact to Joe Public as, say, the latest iD game, it would be nice to see a bit more heterogeny.
Just another thought - these reviews all seem to have to rush themselves, and rarely have time to evaluate long term issues or strengths that arise after a bit of persistant use ~ an example has been the recent rave reviews in the print media of Panther, which I adore, but had several showstopper bugs in .0 which nobody seemed to pick up on until they starting munching on user preferences for breakfast.
YLFIp.s. Worst run on sentance ever.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
This "review" is fundamentally flawed, because I have no idea where in the release notes or Fedora FAQs it states to do what she did to this box, this reads like a whine-fest because Red Hat did not fix her favorite bugs:
.71 to .72 right after you 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.
a) So, the first thing she does is install a third party RPM and then wonders why it blows up in her face? How about the RPMs that came with the distribution? So, the install is brand new already broken in a VMWare installation.
b) Why is she using apt and synaptic? They don't even come with Fedora.
c) The RPM from Sun installs the JVM in all the Mozilla browser's (I didn't install KDE so I can't speak for Konqueror) and even integrates into the GNOME menu.
d) The well known limitations of Fedora's multimedia capabilities plague every linux distribution. It's not Fedora's fault that US laws suck. It's as easy to add multimedia in Fedora as it is in debian, you add one non-free source and you're done.
Here's a hint, if you're the kind of person that worries about moving from gaim
My understanding is that IBM currently recommends either SuSE or Redhat for its Linux customers, depending on where the customer is based. Given that lots of "big" customers have small offices in the boondocks, what are they going to recommend?
Small site typically equates to "we want it cheap, we want it reliable and we want it now. Even though we're part of a big company, head office says we have to keep our costs very low. If we don't we shut up shop". Once you add up lots of small sites, they actually carry a bit of clout in a large organization; you'd better be able to deliver a solution that fits their needs if you want to retain that customer. Quite often, a small site exists solely to service one big customer; global HQ wants to keep that small site happy.
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?
I don't trust Eugenia either. She seems much more obsessed with screenshots and themes than anything else(such as usability).
sure I'll have a sig.
It's good that they are putting all their resources into the enterprise segment, specializing in servers mainly. This is where Linux needs to be. Spreading Linux (meaning resources, the people working with it) too thin at this point, between servers and desktops, is the wrong choice currently. We are in a battle with Microsoft mainly. Microsoft is the undisputed king of desktops. We need to keep making Linux the choice for server and back-office type applications as this is it's strongest position right now and the one place it really can compete with Microsoft.
Microsoft has, in essence, infinite money to put into anything it wants. It currently wants the server market, badly. If they can control this then they will can make communications propriety and fulfill their dreams of world domination, thus have a total monopoly over the desktop and server as they can make them integrate seamlessly and become the sole designer of all applications that require the server-client model and beyond.
Linux currently has a fabulous market share within servers and the fight must continue to make these numbers higher. Spending all the time and resources on desktop issues, such as ease of use just is not the fight to be in right now. It's a fight that really, at the moment or any time soon, cannot be won. The fight for servers can be won.
The developers and contributers to Linux and Linux applications should be doing everything we can to make Linux the de-facto standard on the server. It would be foolish to not recognize our great fortune with our position in the server market. This is why I think Redhat is not only making a wise business move, but also one that will help Linux in general.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
...whatever supposed usability problems Fedora has, there's some great new technology behind it.
For example: they've got a new and shiny version of the glibc & NPTL. This threading support is worlds better than anything I've seen in other distributions or most other operating systems. I wrote a small test for C++-safe thread cancellation support. It failed on pretty much every system I tried. Only Fedora Core 1 and Tru64 passed. This is a behavior more hinted at than mandated by the pthread standard at this point, but realistically, no one would ever use thread cancellation in a C++ program if it didn't work the way it does in Fedora.
There are lots of architectural improvements like that always thrown into a new RedHat release, and I think Fedora will be no different. It leads to their problems with x.0 releases, but I think it's worth it.
In my mind, Fedora Core 1 is RedHat 10 - the name + the community. It even upgraded from my RedHat 9 installation. That's a dead give-away.
Those of us that do file bugs with Redhat in bugzilla have learned that they rarely get addressed unless you yourself provide the solution. There are a few package managers that keep up (httpd, net-snmp), but kernel bugs? Forget about it. Perl bugs? Forget about it. You can give the most detailed bug report possible and you're still lucky if it even gets addressed.
Hell, the other day I reported a bug in anaconda that causes every single raid5 installation to be suspect to corruption, and so far, not even a reply. The most I've seen is that they added someone else's e-mail address to the bug.
Maybe it's not that no one files bugs. Maybe it's that people learned that filing bugs with RedHat was futile.
I think you've made a good point, but Fedora will go a long way to resolving that situation - particularly as Red Hat's more immediately accessable default installer and desktop appeal more to new users - its a chance to get them hooked into bug reporting and, hopefully even better, documentation (one of the areas where Linux needs the msot improvement).
Look at what's happened over the last year - besides the Fedora merger, FreshRPMs, ATRPMs, NewRPMs, and Dag have combined to ensure consistent policy across their repositories. Yellowdog is now likely to become Fedora PPC too.
Developers who work on server software in particular (according to Netcraft and IDC Red Hat dominates in this area) might also be attracted to the 6 month release cycle of Fedora versus the perpetually updating and more bleeding edge testing or unstable.
Wait for some more reports before going to Mandrake 9.2. I had some problems that caused me to switch away from it rather quickly. Possibly software updates would have fixed this, but all the mirrors appeared unuseable...and I'm a MandrakeClub member, so I have access to supposedly private servers. The synthesis files seem to be garbaged.
(Whatever, it didn't solve the problem that I was trying it for, so I'm back to LibraNet Debian... with renewed appreciation.)
OTOH, if it works on your hardware, and is fast enough for you, then go for it. It has many nice features.
Yet again, I've heard some really good things recently about Mandrake 9.1, so see if you can try that version. (Presumably this means that they've fixed the holes that the initial release has...though I don't know for certain. Certainly my initial impression of 9.1 was better than of 9.2, but I no longer remember why.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'd recommend gentoo if you've been using RedHat on a basic level for a while (like I was) and you want to take this opportunity to challenge yourself a bit and learn more about how to really start configuring Linux.