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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."
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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 dont know what that guy was smoking but please let me have some.
My laptop has been a PITA with Mandrake 9 and 9.1 SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 8x and 9..
Install Fedora
ACPI works
Mouse works and it's shutoff button above it.
Broadcom 54G wireless works with Linuxant's driver
I couldnt be happier with this setup.
Now my only concern is one email on the list about patches for security will not be high priority and if you want quick patches to purchase RH WS or ES..
We'll I'm not using it for work just personal. And frankly redhat should still provide fedora patches especially security ones ASAP. Otherwise it will give MS more fuel for their security FUD.
now to order a pizza from the couch via my linux laptop!
Where are you getting this crap from.
Fedora's leadership page clearly lists redhat employees as technical lead, and taking up all the positions on the technical committee. Just because the slashtrolls say redhat's ditched it doesn't mean it's true.
Cheers Koz
I downloaded the Fedora ISOs two days ago; I though "well, my company is evaluating buying RedHat ES for their servers and maybe I can still use Fedora on my personal computer or my laptop, so I can see what is comming" so I gave it a shot.
;)
Here is what I found:
First the good things:
- The installer is much better and gives you the option to upgrade from RedHat 9 to fedora.
- The Video configuration is much more responsive. It got some problems with my NVidia drivers, but it managed to start again without much effort (though the acelerated drivers were deactivaded).
- The OS is much responsive. The Java apps ran faster and i was able to run more things at the same time using the same equipment (Its an old 800Mhz 512MB of ram Dell desktop machine).
Now the bad things:
- I had to reinstall the OS without upgrading; Upgrading broke my printer support (though it got fixed after the reinstall). Also my old GNOME desktop configuration broke. If you can, install from scratch (I have my home directory on a different partition so it wasn't that bad).
- GCVS doesn't work with Fedora. There is a nasty compilation error that prevents it from compile.
- Mozilla is pretty unstable. It crashed today at least four times.
- Firewall builder has some compilation problems.
Luckily I'm the type of user that doesn't need the RedHat support for trivial problems, so their support is not appealing to me (I can survive buyin the WS edition for $179). But now with RedHat saying that they will not support RedHat on the desktop (use Microsoft Windows they say) makes me wonder how good will be WS for application development without an appropiate desktop support (how good or bad the GUI support like GNOME or KDE will be there?).
I'm used to browse the web, chat and read email from Linux; At my work I don't use Windows at all (got OpenOffice, evolution, Jedit and Vi to do all the stuff I require). It is sad to install a Windows license to later log on your Linux server to do development or to administer it.
Don't get me wrong here; I've been a supporter of RedHat in the past (bought their CDs, become a RedHat Certified Engineer), but what incentive I have to report bugs / contribute code / support a 'beta' distribution like Fedora if I'm not going to receive security updates (they state that kind of support is not guaranteed and if the broken app doesn't get a patch then it is removed from the distro).
RedHat needs to come with more information about WS on the desktop, a better support structure for Fedora (security patches, quality control) or their user base will probably move to another distro (why support two flavors of Linux, lets say RedHat and Suse / Debian when they offer support for the desktop and the server).
I wish Mac OS X boxes were cheaper, probably that's an option to consider
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
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.