Fedora 16 Alpha Released

AdamWill writes "Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page."

Comments

Firefox 16

[ikkebra]

I first read this as Firefox 16 Alpha Released and it still made sense.

Re:Firefox 16

[Baloroth]

Nah, thats not for a few weeks yet. I think.

Re:Firefox 16

[Anonymous Coward]

They are still on 13.

Re:Firefox 16

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait for it...
Waaaiit for it...
.
.
FIREFOX 16 IS RELEASED!
NOW it is!
No tabs anymore, no menus and no buttons. Full Gnome 3 integration. Everything you could ever dream of in your worst nightma
FIREFOX 17 IS RELEASED!
Wait... what? How can that be? Isn't FF16 jus
FIREFOX 18 IS RELEASED!
GAAH! Stop i
FIREFOX 19 IS RELEASED!
I...
FIREFOX 20 IS
FIREFOX 20
FIRE
FI
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
I
I
I
I
.
.
.

SINGULARITY

A movie by the Mozilla Foundation

Re:Firefox 16

[Anonymous Coward]

FEDORA not Firefox! Fedora is a Linux distro lmao.

Beta is old hat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all the cool kids are running Alphas!

Does it have a decent desktop?

[mattventura]

I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Nimatek]

Pick the one you like: https://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#desktops
And it's not like you're limited to these few either. No matter what distro, you can always set up a combination of window manager, dock/panel, apps etc. configured precisely the way you like.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the one I like is no longer maintained?

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[ifiwereasculptor]

Well, I tried using Fedora 15 KDE Spin and is was no better. Close to utter crap. Slow to boot and buggy as hell. Dolphin would crash every now and then. After a recent update, boot time nearly doubled and nothing got better, so I decided to install Arch. To my surprise, now KDE was fast, responsive and mostly bug-free. My point: Fedora is too "cutting edge", meaning perpetual beta-quality. So maybe Gnome 3 (or an iminent 3.x) will turn out to be a lot better than what Fedora and other premature releasers are dishing out.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[ifiwereasculptor]

Fork it. Yoo ront.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Burdell]

I switched to XFCE (on Fedora 15). It is similar to the GNOME 2 "look and feel", especially if you spend just a little bit of time moving things around (although the default XFCE "look" isn't bad either).

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

hear hear. I found a repo on the intertubes from someone that made it possible to reinstall Gnome 2. It took some trickery, but I'm now happily back in Gnome 2 on Fedora 15.

http://k3rnel.net/2011/06/15/bluebubble-faq

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[ReinoutS]

How about you try it for more than 5 minutes (say, 5 days), instead of 'immediately' switching away?

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[AdamWill]

Then...that's probably not something Fedora can do a lot about.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Psychotria]

To be fair, that's ultimately a Gnome problem, not a Fedora problem (although I concede that, yes, Fedora has included it in their release, but that's the way it's always been; it brings back fond memories for me of the KDE 4.0 inclusion)

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know... try Fedora 15 KDE from install DVD... works like a charm (if you know how to make your way through it though)
The tags and the nepomuk search and then the upcoming KDE 4.7 functionalities will make it the go to desktop supporting everryyything :)

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Microlith]

Use it for 5 days, get used to working around static elements in the UI you used to be able to change but now can't?

People can adjust to anything, that doesn't resolve the fundamental problems or arrogant attitude conveyed by the GNOME 3 environment.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it have a descent desktop?

Didn't you read the summary? Says right there it has KDE 4.7.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use it for 5 days, get used to working around static elements in the UI you used to be able to change but now can't?

People can adjust to anything, that doesn't resolve the fundamental problems or arrogant attitude conveyed by the GNOME 3 environment.

Isn't the gnome 3 UI highly moddable through javascript?

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Microlith]

Is it?

I was under the impression that a lot of the configurability had been ripped out from the base. Even then, you shouldn't need to be familiar with Javascript just to be able to adjust the panel items (or color) or put items on your desktop.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[mattventura]

Here's the problem: I don't know Javascript, and even if I did, I shouldn't have to know a programming language to tweak my UI.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me crazy but I quite like the Gnome desktop in Fedora 15. On my old laptop it's very snappy and it gets out of the way when I don't want it around. I've not found any reason to dislike it compared to the old way and several reason why I think it's superior. Everyone else's mileage may vary and they can choose whatever they like.

When you make any change, no matter what that change entails, half the people will love it and half will hate it.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[lophophore]

I used Gnome 3 for 3 days, and that was 3 days too many.

What were they thinking? Gaaaaaaack.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[fnj]

Took me 5 minutes to determine that it was such a regression functionally and in regard to flexibility, as to be garbage.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[fnj]

Correctimundo. It is not anything "wrong" with Fedora. This is going to be rammed down everyone's throats in all distros for the simple reason that no one is going to be security patching Gnome2 any more.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, will rebel against the forces at GNOME3 with my last dying breath...

Hey, Fedora devs! How 'bout helping out us folks who run older hardware? The kind of hardware that F15 seems to have left behind. F12 was the last distro you issued that will still run on my P3-700 laptop (still slow, but usable), and F14 is the last one that runs on either of my "faster" machines (Duron 1.6/512MB and AthlonXP 2.4/768MB) without the abomination that is G3.

So, my modest proposal is to keep F14 from running into it's EOL a month after F16 is released. This will allow me to continue to use my old, still running fine, and I'd really like to keep it all out of the landfill, thankyouverymuch, hardware. This would also provide impetus for G2 devs to step up and show the G3 team how to get things done.

Yes, I could get new hardware, but why should I have to? How 'bout folks like the Helios Project that refurbs and donates machines to the needy? They're killing two birds with one stone - helping others while keeping the extra junk from poisoning the planet. After all, you don't see people bemoaning someone who toddles down the road in their Model A. In fact, they seem to hold a reverence for something so old to still be usable. I'm that way about my computers, calculators, and sliderules. You know what the kids are playing with right now? Cassette tapes and LPs. Good thing they haven't found the open-reel player yet...

Keep F14 (Tomcat?) alive until the G3 devs get their heads out of their respective asses, or allow me to install F16 (Falcon?) using G2 on a 512MB machine. Otherwise, I'm moving to Puppy or DSL or somesuch.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Billly Gates]

I did and came running to Windows 7. Let me tell you it was like a breath of fresh air and even that is better than Gnome 3 on a linux kernel. I can't get it to provide basic functionality. Can't even resize a Windows. ... ok later I found out a week later but even grandma knows what a minimize button is come on.

Now that is a big shame since Linux is a technologically supperior OS. But my desktop is not a server.

I have a 23 inch screen and not a phone to run Gnome 3.

Also, Microsoft already has a tile UI in Windows 8 that is loads better and more stable than Gnome. Why isn't it out? Because it is not ready nor customizable as much as the team feels it needs to be. Also Windows 8 still has the Windows 7 desktop too. Gnome 3 went from alpha to stable FAST. No testing. No R&D. No usability testing. Not even configuration! Good GOD

Sun donated 1 billion in usability for gnome 2 and it showed. They threw it away for a bunch of college kids with no expeirence with UI design and usability can do what looked cool on a phone. It is dead and no way in hell will I touch it.

I wish enough geeks would get together and rename gnome 2 into something else and fork it. Maybe do what happened with Samba when it forked and became back together in 2 different modes.

Gnome-shell and gnome 3 needed at least a year of development with UI changes before it would have been close. Instead the focus was on code and a 2 month rush to throw something for a gui on top of it.

The arragant attidue is needed indeed. I really can not use it all. I find it 25 years behind any gui including Windows 1.0. It is a pretty ovlm.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Billly Gates]

Well Fedora is for desktops and workstations so yes it is a Fedora problem.

I just wiped it off my laptop and put Windows 7 on it. It is a shame because I love Fedora and it is my favorite Linux distro. However, I want a basic desktop.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I, for one, will rebel against the forces at GNOME3 with my last dying breath...

Histrionic drama queen much? I hate gnome3 too, but it's hardly racism, poverty, starvation, or disease. Get a grip and grow up.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[ReinoutS]

If you want to put items on your desktop, that's simple: use gnome-tweak-tool or set the org.gnome.desktop.background.show-desktop-icons property to true manually. The fact that this isn't enabled by default doesn't convey an arrogant attitude, but is a simple design decision that flows from the fact that Gnome3 doesn't implement a traditional desktop metaphor, and it wants to minimize visual distraction. For sure, this doesn't mean Gnome 3 is finished. It's only just taking off. There's a lot more in store in the area of 'finding and reminding' in upcoming releases, for instance. In the mean time you can try out some of the Gnome Shell Extensions to tweak the environment to your liking.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[DaVince21]

Considering how Gnome 3.2 is supposed to be "filling the gaps" as opposed to the matured Gnome 2, that might very well be the case!

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[DaVince21]

Personally, I tried it for a few weeks. It's almost workable enough, but there were some big flaws that now make me use something else. Until they fix it. Which apparently they're trying to do now.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[AdamWill]

"Hey, Fedora devs! How 'bout helping out us folks who run older hardware? The kind of hardware that F15 seems to have left behind."

We've thought about it, and, no. Here's a nickel, kid.

(Fedora isn't the distro you're looking for. There are many that are.)

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you try it for more than 5 minutes (say, 5 days), instead of 'immediately' switching away?

How about you try gay sex, you might like it once you tried it.

Another bad Fedora release.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora has been going downhill.
Last release, there were a lot of well known, annoying bugs. Especially with the gnome3 ui.
This release is no exception.
The first thing I noticed is fedora 16 alpha cd takes forever to boot now in virtualbox.
I don't know if this is some kind of regression or feature creep, but it is painful in virtualbox.
Another problem is that when gnome3 finally managed to pop up on screen, it had to use fallback mode. This is understandable since vbox doesn't have 3d acceleration. No biggie, I accept and try booting into fallback mode. I am almost immediately shown a screen with a X{ (dead face) saying that gnome 3 has experienced an unrecoverable error. So I wasn't even able to get to a working ui... good job fedora, another release that doesn't even work in _virtualbox_

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[supersloshy]

It's an alpha release. Expect it to not be stable and still have some kinks that need to be worked out before release. Just report everything you find (if it's not reported already) and hopefully they'll get fixed.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[Picass0]

All you've managed to do is tell me you don't like Gnome 3 and have problems with Virtualbox.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[AdamWill]

We don't support VirtualBox. Mainly because the Fedora kernel developers consider it a pile of...well...something awfully rude. If an issue with VirtualBox is isolated and traced back to something being wrong in Fedora, sure, it'll likely get fixed, but VBox is not something Fedora actively tracks and tests for.

Fedora supports the qemu/kvm/libvirt/virt-manager virtualization stack, and we do test that quite extensively. But running as a virt client is required functionality for Beta, not Alpha.

(FWIW, though, recent VBox releases _do_ have 3D passthrough, and I've seen reports of people getting it working with F15. So it sounds like you maybe have an old VBox?)

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I noticed is fedora 16 alpha cd takes forever to boot now in virtualbox.
I don't know if this is some kind of regression or feature creep, but it is painful in virtualbox.
<snip>
good job fedora, another release that doesn't even work in _virtualbox_

Now you understand why virtualization is evil.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[ifiwereasculptor]

It's an alpha release. Expect it to not be stable and still have some kinks that need to be worked out before release. Just report everything you find (if it's not reported already) and hopefully they'll get fixed.

A nice way to describe Fedora as a whole.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree. And that's NOT a bad thing. Fedora's whole point is to not be a stable, long-term distro so that it has a lot more latitude in which it can experiment. If you're looking for stability and running Fedora, you're the one who's wrong.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[walshy007]

While fedora does tend to be bleeding edge, there is a fair bit of difference between that and _alpha_.

Very good for developer systems, been using it since before ubuntu even existed.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[ifiwereasculptor]

True, in a sense. But it should say so in the "box". A better worded version of "hey, shit tends to break every once in a while, but it's par for the course" somewhere in the website would be nice. Like Debian, that is pretty straightforward about its "unstable" and "testing" branches (both which tend to be more stable than Fedora, in my experience with them).

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox is still a better option for running Windows guests as the vbox graphics drivers make things quite a bit more usable. However, that's really the only reason I've come across for using VirtualBox over KVM in an workstation capacity. KVM/libvirt is a much better choice for Linux guests. I think it would be a waste of time and resources for Fedora to support VirtualBox (esp. considering who's in charge of vbox's fate).

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[fnj]

Mod parent up. It's a perfectly arguable point.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[fnj]

Duh; there is no box. But Fedora is up front about telling you that it is essentially the testing sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise linux. If you don't like bleeding edge, and you don't want to pay for RHEL, just use one of the clones; PUIAS, Scientific Linux, or CentOS. They are absolutely free and absolutely stable, with a long supported life, and are supported with security updates and bug fixes.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[fnj]

You are dying of thirst, crawling in the desert, and come upon the dead carcass of a camel, the only sign of life you have encountered in two days. Instead of realizing that you are after all probably going to die of thirst very soon because there is no rescue, you remark that your problems are due to the camel's design being lacking, and the fact that their owners let camels die.

Face it. The desert is a hellhole, and you probably shouldn't have gone there to spend your summer vacation in the first place.

(The desert is Gnome3; the dead camel symbolizes what happened when Fedora 16 alpha met VirtualBox; I haven't figured out what this has to do with your comment, except you're implying VirtualBox is somehow at fault when a myriad of other linux distros work just fine under it)

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[fnj]

We don't support VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is essentially an x86 host. Fedora is supposed to run on pretty much any x86 host (special hardware features aside). Please consider "supporting" VirtualBox.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[walshy007]

If it runs on real hardware it should run on your VM, if it doesn't the problem is with your VM, not fedora. simple

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[Billly Gates]

I switched to Fedora because it was more stable than Ubuntu.

I know I will probably be modded down as a troll here but my wifi chipset will not work well with any verison of Ubuntu after 7.10. Java apps are buggy and ugly with a 2 year old bug that make them look like Java 1.0/Motif apps. I emailed connical twice and they said ... well its a bug in java not our problem etc. Many java haters I see here who say it is ugly run Ubuntu.

With Fedora my wifi chipset works, java apps look native, and I never have a problem with dependencies like I did with Ubuntu. Yes apt-get can get dependency hell too if you download software off the repositary with conflicts and scattered .conf files. I was trying to fix font rendering issues with Java and gnome with unoffical patches. I find yum mixed with the later rpm versions better with dependencies. Its not the .rpm hell of 2000 anymore and if an installation fails it will delete the files rather than keeping them all over.

Fedora just seems stable for my computers and less flakey. I have never had an issue with Fedora being alpha quality since Fedora core 2 many years ago.

Are panels still broken ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it still "feature":

- the immutable top bar ?
- a missing task bar ?
- no applets whatsoever because weather or CPU speed distract people from work ?
- no shortcuts on desktop nor panel ?
- unmovable date/time in the center because it's not distracting at all (as opposed to all other applets which are a big no-no) ?
- the helpful "if snap to top then maximize" operation that makes moving up windows a tedious multi-click operation ?
- no menus combined with a phone-like laundry list of "apps" icons that can only be reached after watching an animation that puts all my windows on the desktop followed by a required click on "applications" ?
- no shutdown option when logged in ?
- frustratingly slow operation compared to the "distracting" Fedora 14 ?
- many other user-friendly features that I missed ?

If so, then sign me up! Praise the Gnome usability gods for forcing upon me the right way to use my computer!

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[rubycodez]

yes, those are serious bugs but they put out a patch. Things have been much better for me since I applied that patch to my hard drive.

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[walshy007]

Writing this on fedora 15 myself, have none of the things you listed.

Whats that? you used gnome which have been known for their 'lets remove every feature under the sun and turn it into an apple product' for years?

If you were using gnome the gnome 3 disaster was bound to happen, just because of the mentality of the developers. Don't hold it against them though they are just doing what they like. It is usually a good idea to use software whose developers have similar goals to you though, unless you have the power to maintain a fork which most don't.

I like kde (and it has none of the problems you mentioned), but really most power users should be at home with anything that allows them to sort through their windows and has a few widgets on the side for common things.

The dvd releases of your distro of choice usually comes with a bunch of window managers and all the software you're likely to need that you would usually acquire off the net too. So easiest option is to just do that.

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[AdamWill]

If by 'it' you mean 'GNOME 3', and we ignore the inaccuracies in your rant for the sake of concision, then yes, yes 'it' does. But Fedora is not GNOME 3, so why are you posting about this here? Fedora features at least eight desktops, two of which are equally supported as 'premier' environments - GNOME 3 and KDE - and two of which are fairly actively supported and tested - Xfce and LXDE.

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[sensei moreh]

and one of which (LXDE) I'm using quite happily. I did have to revert glibc to version 2.14-6 instead of the current 2.14.90-4 because the latter keeps crashing Firefox (but not Chrome).

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[AdamWill]

Yeah, that's an icky upstream glibc bug, there's a patch submitted upstream: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13013

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[fnj]

That's absolutely true, but the DEFAULT face that Fedora presents the unsophisticated user is Gnome, and Gnome3 is a sad excuse for a DE (Gnome2 was fine). If Fedora doesn't care about unsophisticated users, that's fine; I have no quarrel with that; but it is something that could be fixed simply by demoting Gnome3 and making one of the other decent DE's the default.

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[bahstid]

this.

Already in this thread there are so many "Fedora SUX" type comments, and its beyond me that people won't at least try another desktop before heading off elsewhere... with Ubuntu (and presumably all the other default gnome distro's) all getting the same response, this is turning into a "Linux SUX" issue, especially for first-installer types...

What concerns me in particular, is that at least with the KDE 4.0 debacle, there were quite a few "This is BAD... But I can see it being good in a few versions" type comments.... with Gnome 3, can't think I've seen a single positive comment, at best "changes are sorta manageable".

(KDE *is* really nice now too (Fedora 15 here)... in the same way that gnome is now giving people a poor impression of a lot of distro's I think the poor implementation in Kubuntu has caused a lot of ill will towards KDE too, although I can't speak for recent versions )

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[mfg]

What concerns me in particular, is that at least with the KDE 4.0 debacle, there were quite a few "This is BAD... But I can see it being good in a few versions" type comments.... with Gnome 3, can't think I've seen a single positive comment, at best "changes are sorta manageable".

Yup. The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it simply wasn't even close to release quality; it was early alpha at best, with large chunks of functionality either buggy or unimplemented. 4.2.2 was the first version that I could imagine anyone using as their default desktop; I switched somewhere in the 4.3.x sequence.

The problem with GNOME 3 is that the fundamental design decisions are wrong. No amount of bug fixing etc. is going to make it usable.

Input Indicator

[Microlith]

Good thing they fixed that Input Indicator thing. Maybe they'll also fix it so that it's as easy as it was in GNOME 2 to actually install and activate the input methods. Or is using languages other than English too complicated for users and therefore we shouldn't be doing it?

Re:Input Indicator

[kolbe]

I think anything Gnome 3 will ever try to do will be too complicated for users... it'll never amount to anything but rubbish. Gnome 2.32.1 http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.32/ was the last good version.

Re:Most trolls say toiletnix

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

That was on my wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly switch between English and Canadian French layouts, and Chinese Pinyin input method, so a unified input indicator is a godsend. The other thing on my wishlist is a proper integrated virtual keyboard (I use a touchscreen all-in-one PC), which is scheduled for 3.2 I believe, and then I'll make the switch. I for one like where gnome is going--I'm just in a hurry for it to get there.

Didn't see the G2TJFW option...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the Gnome 2 That Just Fucking Works option...

F14 with Gnome 2 supported my 3 monitor setup beautifully. Gnome 3 just crashes, even in compatibility mode. I'm using Xfce, but it's still missing some of nice things that Gnome 2 had (eg cpu/io panel applets).

Re:Didn't see the G2TJFW option...

[Anonymous Coward]

https://github.com/paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/ is the answer

Really?

[neiras]

I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.

You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.
2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!
3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.
4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop. Having changed the GTK theme from the black Adwaita theme, it even looks like GNOME 2.

Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2. I really don't get what all the bitching is about. Surely a few missing panel applets and a unified settings dialog aren't reasons to discard a desktop environment.

Re:Really?

[mattventura]

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

How the hell is that at all intuitive or good UI design? In other applications, even on windows, you right click the toolbar to customize it. And what was wrong with the "lock to panel" option for applets?

Re:Really?

[Microlith]

It's not a bad idea, but they should prompt the user at least once to tell them. Hiding things in help files isn't a good way of doing things, especially not when the user goes and tries to do something and encounters different behavior.

Re:Really?

[fnj]

Let's face it, it's a BAD idea. A STUPID idea. Keyboard mouse modifiers are BRAIN DEAD, awkward, and completely non necessary. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the old way. Most important, everything was intuitive and discoverable. "By-mistake applet moves," MY LEFT BALL! Every applet was individually lockable in position in Gnome2. Anyone obsessed with fear that he might move them by "mistake" could lock them down, while the rest of us with at least a kindergarten level of motor coordination could leave them bloody well alone.

Re:Really?

[fnj]

The following is styled as if I am speaking to the Gnome developers, not the parent poster. If any of the following have been repaired since 3.0, I apologize, because 3.0 was so AWFUL it made me throw it on the floor within 5 minutes, and I haven't been inclined to waste any more time on the thing since then until I hear that all of the deficiencies noted below have been repaired.

You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

The differences are actually significant and in the direction of LOSS of functionality. I guess you're not using the Drawer, Mini Commander, Weather, System Monitor, and CPU Freq Scaling applets, and I guess you don't have a simple compact digital clock with seconds and date in the upper right corner. Making it IMPOSSIBLE to set it up that way, and with control over the geometry, is NOT ACCEPTABLE because it is a GRATUITOUS loss of flexibility.

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

A stupid and pointless replacing of an intuitive and DISCOVERABLE operation by a HIDDEN and awkward one.

2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!

Allow? FORCE! That's not a feature, it's a bug. Give me CONTROL, dammit.

3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.

I'm not an apologist. I'm a USER. I DEPENDED on those applets. Don't bore me with details of why your stupid infrastructure changes have led you to drop them. Just bring them back. ALL of them!

4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

It's a pointless and needless complication, but yeah, it's not the most egregious of the mistakes.

I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop.

That's nice for you, but I found that Gnome3 WOULDN'T LET me make a desktop that was even remotely like my old one.

Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2.

No, no, NO. It is NOT, and repeating that it IS, does not make it so.

Re:Really?

[illtud]

You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

Yes, when I eventually found this I thougt that I had my old fc14 interface back, but I'm finding that this is serioulsy buggy. I don't know if it's a gnome problem or a FC15 problem, but the ability to do this comes and goes with the wind - when I saw this comment I tried it again, and the menu popped up, GREAT! I didn't select a damn thing then I tried it again, no menu. I have this machine I'm typing this on which I wish I'd never upgraded to FC15. My machine at work will stay at FC14 because it's my dev machine in an enterprise with a team of devs waiting on my say-so to upgrade. FC14 is great for me, I wish I could stick with the UI for that but with updates for the libs and apps - I can't believe that RH can be following this Fedora death-ride, and I'm pretty sure that there's going to be a hard smack-down shortly.

My advice - stick to FC14 'til somebody at RH notices the stupidity of the gnome/FC15 upgrade and wait for the correction.

Re:Really?

[Errtu76]

My advice - stick to FC14 'til somebody at RH notices the stupidity of the gnome/FC15 upgrade and wait for the correction.

You do realize that RH doesn't actually control what's going on in Fedora, right? Sure, a lot of Fedora developers work at RH but it's still a community distribution.

That aside, Fedora has always been about staying close to upstream. If you know this, you would also know that this means you get new 'products' sooner than other distributions. Eventually Debian and the like will also ship GNOME 3 if they decide to ship GNOME.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use GNOME2 and me personally, the first thing I have troubles with when I use Windows is that I CANNOT move my windows by holding Alt, and with left mouse button click and drag the window wherever I like it (using Alt to move stuff around is the GNOME2 standard behaviour, and I like that it seems they have not changed that).
So for me it would be great and intuitive if that also holds true for panels nowdays as well (have yet to try out GNOME3 besides a LiveCD a while back).

Re:Really?

[illtud]

You do realize that RH doesn't actually control what's going on in Fedora, right? Sure, a lot of Fedora developers work at RH but it's still a community distribution.

Yes, absolutely. Will RH whacking them with a cluestick have an effect? Yes, absolutely. Where do you think Fedora would be if it wasn't an RH incubator and with no RH devs working on it?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't generalize here. Something I always miss on OS X and Windows for example is holding the ALT keyboard modifier, then using left click or right click (sometimes middle click) to move and resize windows, no matter where i click them. It's very intuitive (once you know of this feature of course). If you don't realize this feature exists, there's a mouse-only alternative, though (dragging the title bar or border of the window).

Re:Really?

[renoX]

>> 1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

> How the hell is that at all intuitive or good UI design?

Oh, it must be a good UI design since Microsoft does the same in Windows with the "shift+right click" menu that 0.0001% of users know.
So it's not even a *new* UI mistake, it's an old one!!
Those who don't know history ... I guess.

Re:Really?

[DaVince21]

You sound like you're a character from Beneath a Steel Sky, with all those RANDOMLY capitalized WORDS.

Re:Really?

[badkarmadayaccount]

My advice - cut out the crap and run something sensible - like KDE. Fedora has reasonable KDE integration - shutdown a few services, and you're done.

Re:Shit

[kolbe]

tl;dr

I'd rather not lose brain cells to this coward's dribble... might end up like them if I do... idiotic.

If You Can't Stand The Heat

[Anonymous Coward]

get in the walkin.....

Still hiding buttons?

[tenco]

I tried to use LyX 2 with Gnome 3 but couldn't save the path to my custom TeXLive installation in it's settings because the buttons to do so went amiss...

Just say "no"

[lobotomy]

No thanks. Not going to try Fedora 16, ever. I am staying with Fedora 14 for the next few years. Maybe then I'll evaluate the state of desktop interfaces and see if anyone has come to their senses and stopped trying to foist some hipster-designed tablet interface on us. I have work to do with my computer, thank you very much, and that abomination known as Gnome Shell will not allow me to do it.

Re:Just say "no"

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE.

Re:Just say "no"

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE

Not trying to upgrade again for a long while

[BrianMarshall]

A few weeks ago, I installed FC15 (from FC 14). It didn't like my graphics card, so I didn't have as much chance to be horrified as some folks.

I couldn't find a gui app to see what services were being started. In a forum on fedoraforum.org, it said that one was "in the works".

Right. No problem. I went back to FC 14 the day I started this waste of time.

Re:Not trying to upgrade again for a long while

[DaVince21]

And since it's in the works, you can count on it existing when the whole caboodle becomes more stable and accepted.

Re:Not trying to upgrade again for a long while

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't find a gui app to see what services were being started. In a forum on fedoraforum.org, it said that one was "in the works".

You mean systemadm, or something else?

Re:Not trying to upgrade again for a long while

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't find a gui app to see what services were being started. In a forum on fedoraforum.org, it said that one was "in the works".

You mean systemadm, or something else?

I don't know what systemadm is.

I have loved Linux for a long time - first fairly early Red Hat, then Fedora. I was a software developer for more than 2 decades but I never reallly got under the hood of Unix/Linux. I use terminal windows, vi and text files for everything I can. I like to store tabular data in text files so I can manipulate it with awk.

When I setup FC14, I go to System | Administration | Services and set which services I want to start at boot. It seems that to do that now, a person has to go into the underlying config(?) files. Since I know so little about it, I don't like to do that kind of thing. But what is even more important is that what used to be a simple GUI app is now gone. Has the concept of services changed so much that the old app could not be used?

But the really big issue is that if things have changed so much that this simple thing is still "in the works", what other things am I going to discover are gone? I want to use my computer, not fiddle with it. I know Fedora is a leading edge testing ground for Red Hat, but I like Fedora and intend to keep using it if I can. Now FC16 is in Alpha??? What I saw of FC15 looked like Alpha (a few weeks ago).

PLUS, I have a computer that is about 5 years old with a simple graphics card (because I never play computer games). It seems that every new version of Fedora I upgrade to (usually every second one), gets better, cleaner, faster. Now the windowing system needs 3-d hardware graphics acceleration??? WTF is that??? It sounds almost as stupid as Windows - upgrade Windows, need a new computer. Fuck that. And trying to make the screen behave like a smart phone or something? As if it had a screen a few inches across? As the primary direction Gnome is taking? Fuck that too.

I will stay with FC 14 for a while and hope that FC stabilizes into something that is appropriate for desktops.

Re:Not trying to upgrade again for a long while

[badkarmadayaccount]

GNOME has the habit of raping the GPU - kwin handles better, AFAIK.

Nope, not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 16 went from the CD burner to the garbage can in about 30 minutes after a quick test drive. Had not seen the new Gnome until now.....don't want anything else to do with it.

You can still use GNOME 2 with Fedora 15

[sunr2007]

I was pretty frustrated with GNOME3 and just when i thought of giving up and going back to Fedora 14 i found this [1]. I now have a GNOME2 and it works like a charm. [1]http://k3rnel.net/2011/06/22/bluebubble-the-fine-manual/

!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[evilviper]

I can't !@##$%^& believe how Redhat and Fedora can't handle GPT right to save their !@#$@#% lives...

RHEL5 should have included the GRUB patches to handle booting from GPT partitions... They did not. When it was released, 1TB SATA drives were available. RAID-5 with 4x1TB drives? Sorry, no, can't boot from it, unless your RAID controller is smart enough to divvy it up into pieces to make up for for the idiots at RH. I've gone through all kinds of !@##$% because RHEL5 is THE enterprise Linux operating system, and yet it doesn't !@##@$% support installing to, or booting from GPT partitions, which means you're limited to 2TB volumes, max.

Okay, so they made a bad decision, but newer versions will solve all our problems, right? Wrong! Fedora goes back and forth with @$#$%%$^@ bugs around ANACONDA and GPT. Today, I can boot-up with a Fedora 15 disc, go through the menus, take a quick look at the layout, and find I've got 1/3rd unallocated on my 3TB hard drive, because it's using old msdos partitions, and there's no way for me to tell it to use GPT. @#$#$^$%! Put a GPT signature on it you say? Okay, now ANACONDA detects the disk is corrupted and asks if it should abort or wipe it out...

Partition everything manually, you say? Well I would, but GNU parted is absolutely the most god-awful tool I've ever used...

Okay here goes... mkpart 1GB 10GB
WARNING: Not aligned, performance will be terrible... Ignore/Cancel?

WTF? It converts my human units into billions of sectors, and can't be bothered to round it off to the nearest multiple of 8, or friggin' ask me if I want it to do so? Who the hell made this crap? Math is what computers are so damn good at, WTF do I need to pull out a pocket calculator to partition my !@#$#$% computer in the year 2011?

Redhat drives me nuts. Imagine if the most popular luxury sports-car maker out there engineered their cars so that they couldn't be driven for more than 1hr straight, before shutting-down and needing to be restarted. That's the kind of fundamental stupidity we're talking about, here. Middle-of-the-road consumer hardware is over 2TB now, when are they going to fix this !@#$#%?

I know, I know, I don't need to use parted. Someone else had half a brain and hated parted, too, and made gdisk just for this purpose: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ It doesn't take away from the sheer idiocy of either project...

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[Anonymous Coward]

RHEl 6 does. RHEL5 at that lifecycle period SHOULD NOT have any new features. Only security and stability patches allowed.
they know what they are doing.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[Anonymous Coward]

I, too, have been waiting for Fedora to get its act together on GRUB2 and GPT support. There's been no excuse,
they've had it as a proposed feature/project for at least 3 releases now, they've jammed other significant disruptive
features down our throat such as NetworkManager, PulseAudio and systemd that took well over a release cycle
to stabilize, but they keep shying away from this.

I have had GRUB2 and GPT working on a 1TB external USB drive for about a year now, thanks to Ubuntu. It was a
very painful experience, took a lot of careful research to determine how to partition the drive using 'parted', including
setting the bios_grub flag, etc. It seems to work reasonably well, but I'm still not confident that it's 100% correct or
optimized, but I was able to install and boot some Linux distros on it for use with my Acer Aspire netbook - Ubuntu,
openSUSE 11.4, Mandriva (since upgraded to Mageia), but not Fedora 15, whose installer crashed when pointed to the drive.

Trying to install Fedora 16 Alpha x86_64 on my AMD64-based laptop onto a brand-new, just-unboxed 3TB Seagate USB3.0
drive gave me a blank stare when it came to the disk drives. It sees the spindle, and it sees the huge NTFS partition the
vendor sprayed on it, but offered no clue - i.e., didn't propose a suitable partition scheme that might be appropriate - and
I decided at that point that it was just as futile under F16 as it was under F15, F14, F13, ...

Reviewing the various documents on the Fedora Project website gleaned dusty project plans for features that were proposed
for earlier releases, but no indication as to what the current status of support for GPT is now. Very, very pitiful...

Next time someone claims that Fedora is the bleeding-edge Linux release, I'll be able to laugh in their faces.
After using Linux as my primary day-to-day desktop for 17 years or so, maybe it's time to move over to a Mac, and
save the 3TB drive for that.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[g1zmo]

...RHEL5 is THE enterprise Linux operating system...

Then:

Middle-of-the-road consumer hardware is over 2TB now...

Yes, but even high-end enterprise hardware is not up against those limits yet.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[AdamWill]

A USB 3.0 drive? Way to test two variables at once, dude.

When you say "It sees the spindle, and it sees the huge NTFS partition the vendor sprayed on it, but offered no clue - i.e., didn't propose a suitable partition scheme that might be appropriate", what point of the installation are you talking about? Because the point at which it _discovers_ drives and the point at which you choose a partition scheme are different. Also, if you select any of the pre-set partitioning options - 'Use free space', 'Use entire disk', 'Replace existing Linux partitions' - Fedora will come up with a partition scheme for you. If you choose 'custom partitioning', it won't, because hey, _you chose custom partitioning_, which means you want to do it yourself. If the disk is entirely consumed by an NTFS partition you'll need to pick 'Use entire disk', because there's no 'free space' or 'existing Linux partitions', so if you try either of those methods, anaconda won't have any space to put Linux partitions into.

"I decided at that point that it was just as futile under F16 as it was under F15, F14, F13, ..."

Might I suggest the shocking, nay, _radical_ thought that a more complete test might be TO FINISH OFF THE FRACKING INSTALLATION BEFORE YOU SPRAY VITRIOL ALL OVER SLASHDOT?

Whew. Sorry. I feel better now. But, I mean, come on.

F16 uses gpt disk labels by default, for all disks. There's no reason it shouldn't work on your disk, if you pick an appropriate partitioning method.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Use fdisk, partition stuff properly (why would you need more than a few MB for /boot anyway?), and if you find a part of fedora that does not work with your particular setup then you can just replace it. After all, it's still Linux, it's far more customizable than you think and it runs the worlds supercomputers.

Or go back to Windows/AppleOS.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[evilviper]

even high-end enterprise hardware is not up against those limits yet.

That's utterly idiotic. Enterprise SATA drives may lag behind consumer drives, but not by much, and enterprises will ALWAYS have raid arrays (multiplying the sizes), while consumers rarely do. Enterprise SAS drives are 750GBytes now, so it only takes a small array to break the 2TB mark there.

IN AN ENTERPRISE, I had to deal with low-end servers that had over 2TB boot volumes, years ago, running on RHEL4.x (not a typo... RHEL4.x, as in BEFORE RHEL5, and way before RHEL6). It was a PITA, and I can't believe how far behind RedHat is on bringing out full and stable support of GPT installation and booting.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[evilviper]

if you find a part of fedora that does not work with your particular setup then you can just replace it

The biggest part that doesn't work is THE INSTALLER. If you've got a drop-in replacement for that, POINT ME TO IT, because ANACONDA was never impressive, and it's only gotten worse (VNC mode, my ass!).

Or go back to Windows/AppleOS.

Actually, I'd rather go back to a decent Linux distro, say, Slackware... Or maybe FreeBSD, with that wonderful ZFS support (rather than waiting forever for btrfs).

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[evilviper]

RHEl 6 does

No it doesn't. I'm trying to partition my system with RHEL6.0 right now. When it tries to automatically partition the disk, Anaconda blows-up with a "Could not allocate" error.

When I try to manually partition, it only allows me to use the first 2TB, and leaves the rest as "free" which I can NEVER touch. Fill up the first 2TB, and try to create a new partition and it blows up with "cannot allocate".

Maybe RHEL6.1 fixed this, but I doubt it, since I just tested Fedora-16-alpha, and I still have this same damn problem.

RHEL5 at that lifecycle period SHOULD NOT have any new features

No, it should damn-well have come with GPT support from version 5.0, for the important reasons I listed, and you didn't bother to read.

Re:!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not report it on their BugZilla tracker instead of just ranting? Or contact support if you're using RHEL, or go onto one of the Fedora IRC support channels. Perhaps your litany of fury could be made into something useful.

Why Grub 2?

[red crab]

I don't think there was ever a need for GRUB2. Its complex and bloated. Seems like Linux is going more and more towards the proprietary Unix philosophy - doing simple things in difficult way.

Re:Why Grub 2?

[AdamWill]

"Grub (legacy) is no longer supported. Patches are not accepted. Grub2 is also nearing a stable release (14-May-2011 GRUB 1.99) which is something that Grub (legacy) never reached. "

Upstream support, essentially. But yeah, our installer team isn't terribly happy with the design of GRUB 2 either. It's a choice between two evils.

Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

When Apple released their semi-transparent desktop I though that
it's yet another fad like acrylic cases and the round mouse. After all,
we had Windows 2000 and Linux to get the job done.

Windows XP was not too bad because it had a decent compatibility
mode, but recent versions of Windows made Mac look good again.
At that point Linux could win the desktop by doing nothing.

Unfortunately, Gnome 3 has tied the race to the bottom again.
I'm staying with Fedora 14.