Fedora 18 Released

ultranerdz writes "Fedora 18 has been released. Featuring a new installer UI, GNOME 3.6, Clojure, DragonEgg, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Secure Boot, and updated major packages versions, this is one of the most anticipated Fedora versions yet. After more than two months of slips and delays, Fedora 18 is finally here." I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

Comments

How is MATE?

[dstyle5]

I'm tiring of Gnome 3, but would like to stick with Fedora. What are /.ers opinions of MATE?

Re:How is MATE?

[armanox]

MATE seems to pick up right were GNOME 2 stopped. A few of the program names have changed to avoid conflicts with GNOME 3, but I've been using MATE on Fedora since F16 (been using KDE again too).

Re:How is MATE?

[lastx33]

I'm using Mate 1.4 and it is good and definitely improving. There are still some bits of integration, especially in the file manager, which could do with improvement but it's coming along at a pace considering they are also removing a lot of redundant code from Gnome 2. The user experience in pretty near to the final versions of Gnome 2 and coming versions should be even better. Overall, very nice.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

While MATE is nice, it's not as nice as Gnome 2 was in all respects. You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.
The renaming also has some side effects when used with programs that expect the gnome naming, so while most things work, not everything does.

Because MATE isn't quite there yet, and because systemd is an abomination unto Nuggan and grub2 doesn't co-exist with other bootloaders gracefully, I'm still on Fedora 14, and strongly considering going back to Gentoo.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome 3 is fine for me too

Re:How is MATE?

[Cassini2]

After trying very hard to like Unity for several versions, I tried Linux Mint. MATE is a pleasure to use. Everything is where I instinctively look to find it.

You can try prying MATE out of my cold dead hands.

Re:How is MATE?

[ssam]

(I have been running F18 with mate since mid december)
Note that fedora 18 repos only have small selection of mate packages. for example mate-panel-applets is missing, so no system monitor in your panel. none of the MATE apps (beyond the file manager and terminal), and when you run gnome3 apps they dont pick up theming. So while on paper fedora 18 has MATE as an option, the integration is poor. Hopefully this will be improved.

There is an unofficial more complete MATE repo, but it does not support F18 yet.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

Mate is nice. I wanted to like Gnome 3 but just couldn't... it's really backwards for me as a network admin.

Amen. Getting it to play well with remote X or typical rack KVMs with 1024x768 resolution is an exercise in futility. Not to mention running in VMs or remote windows, with the braindead hot spot corners and edges.
Sorry, Gnome 3 devs, I don't want to buy into your iPad envy.

Re:How is MATE?

[ssam]

If you want properly integrated MATE then Fedora is not the best distro. I suggest trying MINT to see how well it can work.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

What's wrong with systemd?

Where should I start?
It abstracts services to the point you can't find them.
It breaks existing sysv startup/shutdown scripts for commercial software. (The reply from vendors of commercial software is pretty unison: We don't support systems with systemd)
It assumes start and stop are always oneliners, so you end up writing startup/shutdown scripts anyhow cause systemd isn't good enough.
It breaks standard runlevels.
It uses the old MSDOS .ini file format, which is severely sysadmin-unfriendly (grep doesn't understand MSDOS [section]s, for example). ... and quite a lot more.

In short, it was clearly written by someone who didn't come from a Unix background. ... or, just try "systemctl -a | cat"[*] , and compare that to "chkconfig" and "rc-update show".

[*]: Yes, the cat is needed, or else it pauses and waits for input - whoever coded this should know that if the user wants paging, he can pipe it to a pager of choice for that task. But nooo, of course you have to do things differently to be different.

In short, it's as bad as pulseaudio, and for many of the same reasons.

Cinnamon

[mx b]

The summary forgot to include Cinnamon (unless it was removed after the beta? I am in the process of running an upgrade!). I have been pleasantly surprised with Cinnamon. In general seems a nice release, the main gripe was the new installer. Does not seem to allow as much choice in terms of packages to install; seems to be a big list of presets without much customization until after it is already installed. It is a pretty though.

Re:Cinnamon

[rubycodez]

I like cinnamon and so use it at work, but with my home system it crashes my nvidia driver and/or seizes up the machine. so I put in Mate instead, and no problems since.

Re:Cinnamon

[craigminah]

I too thought Cinnamon was in the beta...I use it in Mint and it's fantastic.

Re:Cinnamon

[Sponge Bath]

I'm getting hungry.

yum vs apt vs pacman

[Dimwit]

So the only thing that keeps me from using Fedora is yum. I do a lot of "experimental" or "temporary" package installations. I want to try out a new editor or a new programming language or something, so I do an installation. All of the various package managers will automatically pull in the dependencies, which is great, but yum doesn't uninstall these dependencies when I uninstall the original package. So, say I install something that requires 9803942834 dependencies. When I uninstall it under Debian, all those dependencies leave with it - when I uninstall it on Fedora, I still have 9803942834 - 1 packages laying around. It's annoying. Get that fixed with yum, and I'll give Fedora a shot again.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Dimwit]

...and looking, apparently they fixed that a while ago. Interesting. I'll have to check it out.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

Or alternately, just migrate Fedora wholesale onto dpkg.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[arth1]

Unix-like systems are case sensitive -- deal.

• When you use "find", you have to specify -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.JPG' to find both.
• A variable foo in bash isn't the same as the variable FOO (or Foo or fOo or foO or FoO or fOO).
• "makefile" is not the same as "Makefile", and both can (and sometimes do) exist in the same directory.
• The command GET does not do the same as get
• "filename.z" is not the same as "filename.Z" - the former is a pack file and the later a compress file. (Or they may both be text files, because file extensions are only advisory.)

There are operating systems that are case insensitive by default, but Linux isn't one of them. Most would consider this a strength of Linux.

The tablets make me bitter..

[EasyTarget]

That's great, but.. does it still have tablet oriented nonsense like immovable huge dialog boxes that (for example) completely obscure the Print Preview in FFox, preventing me from previewing whatever I'm thinking of printing. Sigh.
Very big nuisance on my netbook with it's small screen. I kept it back at F16 just because of that. I'll upgrade, but wondering if the F18 experience will be a good one.

Re:The tablets make me bitter..

[kwalker]

If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

Available spins as of this morning:
Fedora 18 Desktop Edition
Fedora 18 KDE Spin
Fedora 18 LXDE Spin
Fedora 18 Xfce Spin

Or you can do a minimal install from the installer ISO (Either on DVD, USB stick, or even over a network), then install a desktop of your choice from the following (Incomplete) list:
GNOME 3.6
Cinnamon
MATE
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9
Xfce 4.10
Enlightenment

I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Re:Feedback

[0racle]

I got the upgrade started by adding the following option to fedup-cli
--instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/18/Fedora/x86_64/os/

obviously replace x86_64 with i386 if you have to.

GNOME2!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome. Now I just wish they would dump systemd for initv scripts, dump pulseaudio for OSS and remove all those broken X11 extensions so I can go back to using xv and netscape the way god intended.

Linux mint kde rules

[Vince6791]

Kde is most stable on mint and kubuntu distros. Unity crashes and freezes once in a while same with the rest of the gui's and distros. The crashes and freezes reminds me of windows98 and XP issues. You want reliability go with kde using either mint or kubuntu. I have tried lxde, xfce, mate, cinnamon and they are all buggy and occasionally slow down.

But, I also had metroUI for windows 8 freeze on me a couple of times but the difference is that it did not crash the whole OS. The only thing I had to do to make metro work again is hit the Windows key to go into desktop and hit the key again to go into metro.

I hope ubuntu 13.04 fixes a lot of issues.

Re:Xfce

[cupantae]

First of all, Fluxbox is little more than a window manager, so that's not really comparable to Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE or Unity, which are full desktop environments.

Personally, I like Xfce. Here are some reasons:
1. It's much lighter on resources than Gnome 2/3, KDE or Unity, and a lot snappier.
2. It does have a (fairly limited) compositor, which gives you transparency and shadow options. This doesn't add much in terms of "eye candy", but I'm not really interested in that, and I find these features far more useful than the fancy compiz stuff.
3. I find that Xfce programs play nicely with things outside of Xfce. You don't, for example, get the likes of nautilus starting up a whole load of other services when you actually just want a file manager.
4. Xfce programs have a greater tendency to let you customise things by inserting terminal commands than Gnome or KDE. As a result, I find the Xfce panel easier to work with than the KDE or Gnome ones.
5. I prefer the look of Xfce to any of the others, with the possible exception of Gnome 3. I know it looks more dated, but I like it anyway.
6. It's the only one of them for which I've never thought an "upgrade" was actually a downgrade.

So there you go. That's why. I should add, though, that some of the Xfce programs (e.g. Midori, Squeeze, Ristretto) are of low quality and have to be substituted, but then again, I would never use Konqueror or Epiphany anyway. From what little time I've spent LXDE, I've found it suffers even more from this (I don't even like the terminal emulator).