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Fedora 18 Installer: Counterintuitive and Confusing?
An anonymous reader writes "Igor Ljubuncic, former physicist and current IT Systems Programmer and blogger, reviews Fedora 18 with its new installer. In his role as alter ego Dedoimedo, the self proclaimed 'king of everything', Igor's Linux distro and DE reviews are often wry and biting and this review is no exception: 'You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe. In all my life testing Linux and other operating systems, I have never ever seen an installer that is so counter-intuitive, dangerous and useless, all at the same time.'"
The non-linear installer interface does look like kind of confusing, at least from the screenshots posted.
I am also extremely disappointed in this Fedora release. The installer is confusing and exhibits seemingly random behavior. I was so overjoyed I managed to get it to install it the way I wanted just once on a VM that I went and tried to install in a number of other places. No go.
And after you install, a lot of things are kind of buggy and seemingly incomplete.
Of course, since the installer didn't really work at all until you got to release candidate 4 or so, I can't really expect any other part of the system to have been decently tested.
This is a horrible release and should be skipped. If Fedora continues to go in this direction, I will have to abandon it, despite the fact that the only other decent alternative is Ubuntu, and I despise it. I've been an RH/Fedora user since 1999 or so.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Do all the cool touch screen wicked BITCHUN shit but do it for the wrong system in the wrong way with the wrong tools and make them happy Magic Kingdom goers GAG on it.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
worked great for me.(It upgraded from Fedora 17 to 18)
How is Debian non intuitive? You just go through the flow and answer the questions. Even my most junior IT employees don't have trouble with it. With the new Fedora, it's a maze of twisty passages, all alike. There is no flow. There is no wizard. There's just a bunch of nonlinear roundabouts in a hub and spoke model. It's less like the Debian method of driving from point A to point B. It's more like the Roman model where all roads lead to Rome, and you have to return to Rome to get to anywhere else. That's why technical people hated the confused roundabout, illogical mess that the Fedora installer has become.
Quoth the Fedora wiki,
So, it's like the Debian installer, only less powerful and more confusing!
/me runs away
A beta of Fedora 18's installer completely wiped my hard drive. I told it to partition the drive. It partitioned it, installed Linux fine, and ALSO formatted every NTFS partition to a fresh EXT4. Even for a beta, this is a sign there's something seriously wrong. After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional. Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit. The delta-compressed updates is a huge deal for me, but also the general speed of the tools. OpenSuSE's zypper tool also gives a bit of freedom in installing 'unmatched' later versions of libs but if things go wrong, it's easy to trace and downgrade. Also, the package management tools integrate with btrfs snapshots and there's a powerful tool called 'snapper' which gives you quick access to rollback or version diffs.
We know what that means.
The fact is Fedora is even easier than Debian so WTF is this guy talking about when he says saying a disk is full is waaay too advanced. Yes, for my Mom she doesn't know what that means and is too advanced for joe six pack. But for the geek crowd it makes sense.
I have not run Fedora 18 yet but I plan to this weekend. The screenshots look similiar to earlier versions so I assume it is just that. I do not see the big deal with anaconda. It talks about disk space, some packages online, then reboots but goes into another setup after a reboot (just like Windows 7) where it asks for a user account. Then done.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm what I would consider a 'normal' Linux user, if that exists. I'm comfortable in Linux and with the terminal. I tend to freak out during partitioning anyway, because most of my systems are dual-boot with ntfs and ext partitions. I do not like the new partition creator. FWIW, after the install I went back to beefy miracle, but for issues more related to legacy hardware than anything else.
You know what? If Igor thinks can do it better, then he should fork that thing and roll his own distro.
Or, instead of forking, contribute a patch or two to improve things.
I thought I could improve RAID in the Linux kernel, so I did. Patch accepted, so now when I download a new version of Linux, it includes my fix and thousand of improvements others have made. I thought I could improve Apache, so I did. Patch accepted. I thought I could improve Moodle in a half a dozen ways. Half a dozen patches accepted. I thought I could improve Linux:LVM. I'm now the maintainer.
Forking is the last resort, when no reasonable patches are accepted. If you don't like the way something works in OSS, contribute a fix.
For those of us fed up where with where distros are going these days, it's looking to me like Linux Mint is probably the place I'm going to end up. I want a system I can understand, manipulate and use. Crap like this installer, the new systemd stuff, I just don't need or want. Sadly it looks like Microsoft has little to fear as we're doing a good job of taking ourselves out of the game and market without them having to do much.
Given that the installer is so dangerous, I cannot recommend F18 to any non-expert. Who knows what it will do to your existing windows or linux installs. Maybe F18 should be considered VM only?
I don't understand what's happening with Linux these days. Buggy installers, crappy UIs in an attempt to change the "GUI paradigm" for whatever reason, unstable software (particularly compared to that in, say, Windows 7), kernel/power regressions, etc. I was interested in Linux because it was (at some point in time) more robust and stable than Windows, that it was technically superior. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
NB. I'm talking about desktop use; I'm sure Linux is superior in many ways for servers and embedded devices - the desktop experience as a whole still seems rather immature still unfortunately.
Probably because, from a quick glance, the only thing worse in his review than the new installer is the review itself. Seriously, he should stop trying to be funny, because, well, he isn't. I particularly love how he has no less than 3 screenshots of an option called "full disk summary and options" in a section complaining about how it doesn't display the full information about the disk (seems he never bothered to click on it). True, he shouldn't have to click on it, given the design of the installer, but clearly the basic installer screen didn't like his setup, so the fallback option seems logical.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I haven't used RH in over a decade--but do remember years ago they had a decent installer that would even pull up a tetris game to occupy you while it copied files. Sad to hear it's gone downhill. (Or am I recalling Caldera's installer?)
If you're on a laptop using some ati chipsets, beware of F18. The video hardware won't resume after a suspend so you have to hard reboot it when resuming to get control back. I can't believe they last that bug go thorugh.
And don't get me started on the stupidity of /tmp as tmpfs...
He obviously comes from the Windows world, where rebooting actually sometimes fixes random behaviour.
Takes a while to learn that it ain't so with another OS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A while ago, everyone tried to copy Apple's "intuitive" interface. The idea was, mostly, to make it confusing for geeks so it has to be intuitive for non-geeks, or at least they have to feel on equal footing, at least it seems that way from the usual results.
Now the source for ideas is Windows 8, the "everything must look like it's for a tablet" experience?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It doesn't look like FUD exactly. That bit about two HD icons with identical model names side by side in no particular order isn't a geek vs. non-geek issue, it's a bad UI decision.
No auto login isn't geek vs. non-geek either, nor is having to root around on the fs to find the installer.
Things like that are just broken for geeks and non-geeks alike. It's a big step backwards from the old installer.
I installed Fedora 18 (KDE Spin, of course) on Friday and "counterintuitive and confusing" was a pretty good description. And the partitioning- yeesh, what a mess- please just give me the option for something nice like gparted. I was very disappointed. 17 was much better. Both were still better than Ubuntu. Neither is as good as Mandriva/Mageia.
There has to be a balance between streamlining vs. asking questions vs. expert mode. There is little balance in Fedora 18. I have a feeling it will be revised quite a bit for 19 (at least I hope it will).
So basically what you're saying is that in order to have any right to complain about open source software you have to have knowledge, experience, and skill in programming? Because when you say "Why don't you submit a patch?", that's what you're implying.
Newsflash: Not every user of FOSS software knows how to program. Nor should they need to know. Unless you want it to turn into some sort of exclusive little club, in which case the worldwide share of Linux would drop by a good 99%.
Users aren't complaining because they want to be whiny or difficult. They're complaining because they see a flaw. If you want your software to be widely accepted, listen. If your software is just coding for self satisfaction, and you don't care about user adoption, then don't listen.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Even when both user and dev are programmers of the same skill level there's a huge gulf in knowledge. A 5 hour patch for the user might be a 5 minute job for a dev since they've already learned the code. So I generally use my dev skills to give a really good description of the problem and test cases. Usually the only times I write a patch are when it's a feature specifically for me, or I've gone into so much detail finding the bug I already found the fix. I consider that to be a good contribution to the community and on projects I've managed in the past I really appreciated users who gave good bug reports.
Tone is also a big factor of course, I find general nagging to be more acceptable for a large project where the individual devs have less personal stake in the project (and are more likely to be paid). Ragging on a one person hobby project is just kinda pointless.
I stole this Sig
Only when you first install, eg in grub.conf:
title Microsoft Windows
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
Agreed. Debian got it right. Installation is a mostly linear process. There may be some steps that can be skipped in some cases, but the order will not really change. You never install the base system before partitioning the drive, etc. I am an expert and I very rarely have any need or desire to go out of order with a Debian installation.
I appreciate that Fedora wants to accommodate those rare cases, but doing away with all concept of a linear order isn't the way to do it. I can't imagine what they're thinking with Fedora.
Dare I say this is why people use Windows and not Nix? I'm sure you could recompile the mess to your liking though... Just get g'ma to do that.
Why is providing feedback whining to you? I find it to be more helpful than random patches or other contributions.
Thing is, I don't want everyone and their brother submitting patches to a project I work on. I prefer the coding to be done by a core group of people I've vetted and know they are willing to maintain what they submit. I'd much rather get feedback to see if my ideas are headed in the right way my userbase wants it to be headed. Sure, I don't always go in that direction, but it's helpful to see what they want. And it way beats a poorly written patch submitted by someone who doesn't want to maintain it.
> So, it's like the Debian installer, only less powerful and more confusing!
Well, yeah, but it's a lot of new code for this release. I'm hoping in Erwin's Kitty they will have an advanced button that will help out. If nothing else, at least have a way to get more package granularity.
It looks like there's an option to disable SELinux, which I consider a screaming pile of excrement. Previously, installing SELinux couldn't be prevented and disabling it caused the boot process to fail. I'm delighted that there's now an option to turn it off, if that works.
Too bad I rely absolutely on one computer, and can't afford the risk involved in a botched install of F18.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
why not, mint 11 would though all sorts of errors on boot, the seconds boot a whole new set of errors, keep rebooting and it would eventually unfuck itself, and thats why I quit using mint
I don't know what I was thinking to enlist in redhats beta program (AKA fedora) .. I never admitted to having a brain.
Starting from Fedora 16.
Put F18 disk in drive and boots new UI. My immediate thought was oh great more ultra modern zombie interface bs.
I was confused do I just click next and continue? Where are all the options/upgrade settings and all of the old raid/enterprise? Will it just be smart enough to work and upgrade my system?
What scares me the most is that I'm 95% sure it would have auto-installed itself had I clicked continue with NO prompting and no scary messages of any kind. I say this cause I later spun up a VM with F18 and when you click continue on the main screen if its not shadowed out thats it.
Then I give up and RTFM check wiki apparently you can't upgrade from anything earlier than 17.
Okie so previous attempts to use the yum repo approach always ended in disaster...burn DVD... upgrade 16->17 from DVD runs flawlessly as ususal.
I'm now running F17. Wiki says I need to install fedup to upgrade to F18... alright do that.
Reboot and the fedup fedora icon keeps blinking on screen as if it is doing something but nothing happens..ever.. I waited an hour and it was not even touching the disks... hit escape to check for any useful hints messages or errors...none...of course.
So much for fedup... fedup with fedup just way too obvious.
Next reboot to F17...hey I know I'll type yum update and ah try again..yea thats it... it downloads tons of patches and I reboot to an instant kernel panic.. apparently a regression..so I spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how to change grub to prefer the old kernel version that still works. The files I found had an annoying nack for being auto generated with comments pointing to stuff only relevant for previous versions of grub. In hindsight uninstalling the bad kernel package would have been a lot easier.
So next I try fedup again after clearing out its data and surprise the same problem.
So much for F18 I'll try again with F19 and hope for better luck.
If linux distro folk are looking something actually broken to improve here are a few ideas:
So once installed the UI's look really nice...lol love KDE's windows 7 gadgets knockoff down to the exact behavior and configuration icons.... but still linux fonts suck, low quality, poor selection, too big, too aliased.
Try replacing a failed disk in a raid1 intel matrix fakeraid setup with a drive of a different (larger) size... WTF.. honestly.. its f'in impossible. or mirroring an existing system without reinstalling. Also impossible. In windows it takes 20 seconds and a few clicks of a mouse.
Replace ping with a version that works with both address families like all of the other operating systems and all of the other network utilities.
Please keep at the least the basic x86 libraries by default on 64-bit systems so we can run the same commercial stuff without going thru unecessary hoops.
Presumably the bad installer has no impact when upgrading in place. Any field reports from those running preupgrade on F17?
Anybody want a peanut?
I don't think I buy that "analysis" (using the term loosely). I mean, ultimately, the point of the gift is to be of use to people. If your gift isn't useful to people, you need to know that -- so you need those complaints.
Which is to say: The complaints are a contribution, and in this case, one desperately needed.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So in a sense Fedora is for IT pros but not unix hardcore elitists who know what a wifi chipset is or what it means when a disk is full.
WTF? Any "IT Pro" in my org who didn't know what those things were would not be working there long if I had anything to do with it.
Oh... I get it. You're trying to get us to believe that an "IT Pro" is a product manager or some other variety of tie-caddy. And that a "Unix elitist" is what most of us would think of as an "IT Pro".
Which to me demonstrates that you are probably an idiot.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Takes a while to learn that it ain't so with another OS.
I like the part where after the reboot he had even more problems. I'd hardly trumpet this as a triumph for linux over windows.
His whole review is on KDE. Now granted Fedora might of setup KDE wrong but their main suggested desktop is gnome. I really didn't see anything wrong with the installer. Still better then Windows.
You have to acknowledge some of his points. Showing two identical disk names without any further distinction is retarded, there's just no way around it.
Don't treat users like stupid sheep who'd be confused by /dev/sda or whatever it is. You take away all starting-points for them to even learn something. I didn't learn UNIX because everything was hidden away from me, I learned it because I _saw_ stuff and it made sense.
Dont hide details. Have them make sense.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
... and the hyperlinked disk summary and options gives an empty screen.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Yeah, with Linux in particular, rebooting doesn't actually fix the random behaviour.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
If my installer doesn't use code page 437 IBM glyphs and 16-bit EGA colors, then fuck it.
Couldn't get it to boot...unfortunately I'm one of those charlatans that made the fatal mistake of buying a computer with UEFI and no way to turn secure boot off (HP p6-2142), I can't get it to boot anything other than Windows 7, Ubuntu or Fedora. And I was hoping to use FreeBSD...
:-( Secure boot is a nightmare. On top of some UEFI bioses not having the option to disable it, another option is required to enable "legacy boot" mode; where "legacy" in this case means "anything other than Windows 8". Some bioses allow disabling Secure Boot, yet still don't have a "legacy boot" option. :-/
What I'm really dissappointed by is that some manufacturers (Lenovo, for one) don't seem to include anything about UEFI bios settings in their documentation for laptops they sell. I recently had to do an install on a Lenovo P500, and on this box getting into the UEFI bios requires pressing a separate tiny button on the side of the laptop while the laptop is off. See the text on Page 20 and the diagram on Page 5 of the following document (which doesn't ship with the laptop):
http://download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles_pub/ideapad_z500p500_ug_v1.0_july_2012_english.pdf
Matthew Garrett has a signed "shim" for Grub which the other distributions which will let them boot even when the "secure boot" option is enabled; so OpenSuSE will have this solved soon. Hopefully Debian soon will as well.
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20522.html
NEXT year will totally be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Did a fresh F18 install on my laptop this past week.
I have to agree with a lot of the criticism of the new installer, and particularly the user interface for disk partitioning. I've been running Linux since the late 90s and I don't think I've ever been confused by a partition editor, from fdisk on up - until now.
I mean, the error message I got was "Not enough disk space to create a mountpoint". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!? And this while trying to get the thing to recognize my existing /home partition.
It's like someone who has never partitioned a disk before created a really bad abstract model of the process and then based the whole user interface off of their grand concept. In the process of trying to make things easy they made it hard for anyone who knows what they are doing to be specific about what should be done. A liberal sprinkling of incorrectly-used disk partitioning terms makes for a real perfect storm of confusion.
Once I got things installed, I had no problems at all. I hope to never feel that "oh shit, I hope I haven't just blown my /home away" thrill ever again though.
Everyone who likes Unix-like systems won't install any lennartware on his system. Everything I ever installed which was written by Lennart Poettering does not work. Beware... he also has his fingers in the Fedora distribution.
systemd causes extremely weird behavior of the hardware (simple things like the power switch do not work anymore, cannot shutdown the PC anymore, even after pressing the power switch for 5 seconds! wtf??).
The pulseaudio stuff never worked for me... consequently I install my whole system directly on alsa, because I need sound support and no choking applications. Sometimes you cannot even login, because some desktop environments want to play the start sound.
Avahi is pure shit... networking is even less confusing without it. Avoiding it means: less confusing system. And think about it: actually it comes from "zeroconf" which suggest that everything is easier.
xdg-system is simply annoying. I have never seen any software using such a weird kind of logic: try Gnome/KDE/... start facilities, not supported, then open file with $BROWSER (this isn't even a well-known environment variable), if $BROWSER is not set, use Firefox... wtf??!! When I don't have Firefox... this is bad and when I already open the URI in Firefox it is just worse! xdg is actually doing nothing that is useful.
Please Lennart... use brain when developing applications.
The times (plural) I've tried this installer in VMs or on Netbooks I've not been able to see the partition size box on the right of the screen so I had no way of having any form of custom partition sizing. Now given that the default is to split a disk in half for /home and half for / I think it's pretty reasonable that people might want to give 90% of their big fat disk to their data and a perfectly adequate remaining amount to the OS.
While suggesting alternatives, it's good to suggest members of the same 'family' of distros, since the user might have had reasons for picking one. If someone's trying out Fedora, then alternatives would be PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Mandriva, Blag or Scientific Linux. If one is trying out Ubuntu, one might want to go w/ Mint, Hybryde, Zorin, Trisquel or any of the others. If one was w/ Slackware, try out Vector, Slax, Salix or Slackel. If one was w/ Gentoo, try out Sabayon or Calculate Linux. If one was w/ Arch, try out Chakra, Frugalware or Manjaro. In short, suggest something that's more likely to preserve most of the attributes of a distro, while avoiding the rough edges.
Slashdot articles about Fedora don't get a lot of comments. I think the world has moved on, Fedora tries to explain itself as a nice "workstation distro" but what does that even mean?
Opensuse, Debian and Ubuntu both have different features that make them useful to different people. What does Fedora have?
I wonder how many active developers fedora has? Does the linux community give fedora undeserved attention because of its past glory? How much resources does redhat put into it? They've (rightly) said that they think "Desktop Linux" is a dead cause. Is fedora just a testing ground for RHEL, officialy no, but is that true?
I thought it was o.k. except the partitioning part. I got pretty confused there - and all I wanted to do was to blow out the old drive and do a fresh install.
There was never an option to change the computer name - that was unfortunate. Had to google a bit to figure out how after the install was done.
Oh and the time zone thing. Networking is there - go ahead and get me closer to where I actually am. Poking at the little map to get the right city was annoying.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Try it. The LiveCD based installer is really good. I've run it a number of times on different hardware and Virtual Machines and haven't had a problem yet. Also, the desktop doesn't suck like Gnome 3some or KDEsaster.
I used Gentoo a while back with a low power VIA system that had a CPU that could seriously benefit from the right compiler flags (it was more than a 386 but less than some 586 systems), but it was a bit rough around the edges with a few configuration changes that seemed to be for no reason other than make it different from any other *nix. I'm using FreeBSD with the ports collection on a few systems now - it looks to me to be a superior implementation of what was intended with Gentoo, but they've had more time to do it so that's no criticism of Gentoo.
Fedora seems to have lost it's way with this release.
The installer wasn't great but alot of other changes changes are in the release that are really poorly thought out.
There is stuff changed that I just can't work out why on earth they would change it.
I would really like to see someone smush android-x86.org on top of a fedora like distribution and go from there.
For intel not to do this is imho basically insane. They are in big big trouble, I guess they haven't realised how big yet.
I just installed Peppermint, and it defaulted to black text on a black background during install. Somewhat challenging...
It doesn't look like FUD exactly. That bit about two HD icons with identical model names side by side in no particular order isn't a geek vs. non-geek issue, it's a bad UI decision.
No auto login isn't geek vs. non-geek either, nor is having to root around on the fs to find the installer.
Things like that are just broken for geeks and non-geeks alike. It's a big step backwards from the old installer.
Red Hat installers have been buggy mess since forever. Even back in the days of Red Hat 4 there were issues like nag screens popping up but your crappy 640x480 display was so much smaller than the RH developer's magnificent 1280x768 display that the OK button ended up off screen. Another one of my favorites was a RH installer where you ended up filling out a form but to fill it out you needed information form the previous screen which was no biggie except.... there was no back button.... **curses** restart install... reach for pen and paper....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Did you make sure that your computer had power? Was it turned on?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
but now that they're going off on the same kind of tangent that brought us Gnome 3 (which nobody is really very hot on, but they tolerate it)
I'm always curious what people find bad about Gnome 3 - it's about the best desktop environment I've used IMHO. There are a few niggles:
1. They have removed some options for the sake of simplicity which really shouldn't have been removed, and wouldn't have made things more complex if they were there. For example, not having a "disabled" option in the DPMS timeout is a WTF, as is hiding the "Power off" option until you press the magic "Alt" key (with no visual cues that you could press Alt to get at it).
2. They have copied apple's unintuitive mode-switching for the launcher icons. When I click on a launcher icon I always want it to launch a new window for that application; changing to a "raise all the existing windows that application has open" if it has at least one window open is idiotic, I can't think of a time I ever want to raise all 15 open terminal windows at the same time instead of openning a new one.
3. They've abolished minimise. However, shading windows is still possible and that's almost as good.
4. Focus stealing is a problem - Compiz/Beryl did a much better job at stopping this.
I should mention that I thought Gnome 2 was pretty much the worst DE I've ever used - that seemed to be an exercise in copying the worst bits of Windows and removing any options that might make it tollerable. Up until Gnome 3, I was using E17, largely because it was light, fast and just got out of my way when I wanted to get stuff done.
Well, given the immaturity surrounding Fedora 18's name and the questionability of the installer, we'll probably be moving everything to RHEL and keeping the entire office as a split Windows | RHEL setup.
I'd say that making a policy decision based on the name that has been given to a release is a bit daft - I care not what things are called, only how well they do the job I need them to do. However, I haven't tried F18 so can't comment on the quality of the software - I'm currently still running F16 on my workstations, and will likely skip F18, given the poor reviews.
Given that you said you've been happy with every release until now, why not wait until F19 and see if the problems have been fixed? This certainly isn't the first time Fedora have jumped the shark by pushing a technology that was nowhere near ready (can you say "SElinux" and "Pulse Audio"?), but generally when they've done it, its been largely fixed up within 1 or 2 releases.
We're largely running Fedora workstations and Scientific Linux servers here (occasionally Debian for non-x86 hardware), and it seems to work well.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
It makes sense that they might want to avoid using "/dev/sda" type names, as that is meaningless to a non technical or non *nix person. And Linux assigns those somewhat arbitrarily anyway.
What the UI needs to show is at least the name of the adapter and which device the drive is on the adapter - and in that order. If you are installing an OS, you should at least be familiar enough with your hardware to know that much.
The Fedora 18 installer isn't so linear. It's more like a control panel where before installation there is a hub of icons for things that can be configured. The user doesn't have to click on them at all unless there is an exclamation against the icon. When all the exclamations are cleared the install can proceed.
While installation is in progress, the user can also set the login account info immediately and walk away which means as soon as installation is done the process is complete.
I think metaphor of a hub is quite confusing and tools such as the disk partitioner really feel clunky. I think the hub needs to be done away with something which can be used like a wizard in a linear fashion but also randomly - the obvious solution would be to stick all the tasks into a shelf and put Next / Prev buttons on the display. User can hit next to go through them or explicitly click an icon to jump straight to that page. When all exclamation points are cleared the install button at the end of the shelf lights up and the user can kick it off by clicking that.
I think the account setup which is available during installation is useful. I imagine that its common enough for sysadmins to kick off an install, forget about it, come back hours later and realise it's not done yet because of some extra questions it needs. This way they can fill them out before they leave and it will be complete whenever they return.
Back when GNOME turned into this abomination which targetted tablet computing, I ended up moving to CentOS only to find that it is wrought with limitaitons giving me a whole new perspective on the relationship between kernel and OS as well as between the OS and the application. Recently, Linus blasted a kernel maintainer for breaking application compatibility. Similarly, I blast GNOME for integrating an application library into their UI. (In this case GTK/GTK+) That choice prevents me from effectively running GIMP versions newer than 2.6.x on CentOS. Anyway, that's not what I'm here to comment about.
I tried F18 in a VM. I wanted to see if I could get MATE going. Well, I was quite successful. It didn't take long to learn I needed to use the net installer to make it happen. But there were a few confusing things in the installer. For one, there were these warning road signs on the many buttons. Eventually some of them cleared. But it was impossible to learn what those warning sign icons meant. I may have to run through the process again to see if I can determine exactly what they intended to mean, but it wasn't readily apparent. I tried hovering over them to see if more information appeared, but no. I did note that at least one cleared itself as I tweaked on other things.
I get that the new installer wants to be more of a control panel interface than a "wizard" and I can appreciate the approach. The wizard approach was initially annoying to me and to many others when it first arrived so long ago. Linear and limiting. But then again, it is somewhat appropriate for an installer to behave like this.
Anyway, the new installer did not prevent me from getting what I wanted. But then again, what I wanted was to see MATE installed. I did not do any more than that. Perhaps I need to give it another look, but I am prepared to go to F18 if only to escape the CentOS limits as I find myself exasperated by what I learned of how GNOME breaks user applications and their lack of concern for what it means to do so.
Agreed on the hard disk naming thing but its been doing that for ages and isn't new to this installer.
But there are also users that don't want to learn, but just want to use. On the other hand, there is some knowledge involved in installing a linux system, or windows, for that matter. User tests should be targeted as such, so "the installer is too complex for my granny" isn't valid.
12.3 will be released soon.
Well, for those of us who don't like the way distros are going these days, there's always Slackware. Apart from the installation media, the installer process hasn't changed much in 20 years. It's fast, simple and easy. Sure it's text-only, but since the whole process is so quick, who cares?
It doesn't look like FUD exactly. That bit about two HD icons with identical model names side by side in no particular order isn't a geek vs. non-geek issue, it's a bad UI decision.
No auto login isn't geek vs. non-geek either, nor is having to root around on the fs to find the installer.
Things like that are just broken for geeks and non-geeks alike. It's a big step backwards from the old installer.
Red Hat installers have been buggy mess since forever. Even back in the days of Red Hat 4 there were issues like nag screens popping up but your crappy 640x480 display was so much smaller than the RH developer's magnificent 1280x768 display that the OK button ended up off screen. Another one of my favorites was a RH installer where you ended up filling out a form but to fill it out you needed information form the previous screen which was no biggie except.... there was no back button.... **curses** restart install... reach for pen and paper....
Come to think about it I'm not sure that RH even used a GUI installer until RH5 or 6 IIRC, but the thing was and always has been rather buggy.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Anyone can make a system "easy" by hiding away all the details and anyone can make a system "powerful" by providing config knobs for every minute detail and drowning the user in debug output.
The real genius is designing a system so it's easy to understand and use, i.e. it's cleanly designed and "makes sense" and has well-thought config defaults, yet provides reasonable configurability without "overengineering". That seems exceptionally hard.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
No. I have a hard time with that idea. This whole UI scrambling seems to be born of fear. Fear of what exactly, I don't know. But they appear to be running away from something rather than moving to something.
You know what? If Igor thinks can do it better, then he should fork that thing and roll his own distro. Lots of people have something to complain about, but very very few pitch in and try to help or change things. http://is.gd/tM5hgy
"former physicist and current IT Systems Programmer and blogger"
In the case of usability of a consumer/desktop Linux distribution, I would rather read a review my "Mary, mom and totally newbie".
Usability these days feels more like mental masturbation by everybody in IT than anything else.
none
you put something out there, it includes an unstated promise, namely that it will work and be useful enough to invest the time in.
That's called "warranty of merchantability" - "merchant" as in "buy and sell". It's an implied promise that if you buy something from me, I'll deliver something worth buying. If you're not buying anything from me, the terms aren't implied, they are clearly stated. I put it out there because it's useful to ME, so it might be useful to you, too. I have no obligation to spend my days making something you'll like - you haven't given me anything. Every GPL package includes a clear statement of these terms:
15. THERE IS NO WARRANTY ... PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Again, we write GPL software because it's useful for US, or for our customers. We decide how to spend our time, how to design a system we create. If you want to be part of the "us" that makes decisions, edit the damn wiki or something.
I'm actually undoing previous moderations just to reply to this, because it is so stupid and uninsightful.
Do you have any idea how many FOSS programs from how many authors/projects I use every day? Let me just name a few: Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla), LaTeX (TUG), bash/zsh (a community), gfortran/gcc (GNU), vim (another community), ArchLinux (yet another community), GIMP (GNU), Inkscape (yet another community), and the list goes on.
Do you really think I (or anyone else in the world) have contributed to each and every of these projects? I can honestly say that I have contributed to two of these: ArchLinux (wiki editing) and vim (scripting), but I am a programmer, and "ordinary" people contribute less, I assume. I think you should count yourself very lucky if even 5% of your users contribute to your specific project.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Why don't you just keep running Fedora 17?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I consider that to be a good contribution to the community and on projects I've managed in the past I really appreciated users who gave good bug reports.
I'll second that. A well-considered bug report is often a lot more valuable than any kind of whine, since it will often lead the dev to the exact point where the problem lies, while for another programmer (without the benefit of familiarity) might take some time to find and fix the issue.
Go play with a debian when it mentions all sorts of of archaic things like subnet masks to noobs. My mom still does not know what an IP address is and would freak in comparison.
Which version of IP is used is totally irrelevant to an argument over Linux vs Windows vs BSD
Switch to IPv6, and you won't ever have to deal w/ subnet masks again. Within a single /64 link, you'll have all the addresses you need for everything. Every NFS service can have its own address. Your e-mail server can have an address, each of your virtual web hosts can be a real standalone web host w/ different IPs, each of your kvm virtual machines can have a different public IP address, and so on. I dunno about Debian, Fedora and other Linuxes, but at least FBSD/PC-BSD have the capabilities to handle IPv6 very well - in fact, you can even set it up as IPv6-only.
Yeah, the address will still be longer than your mom will like, but it'll be something that rarely has to be used, and in the event that one has to use it often, one can set up a DHCP6 server to handle it and assign it a simple address that's easier to enter.
Richard Stallman does NOT want your software to be widely used by people who contribute nothing??!? Really?! Is that what he said?
testing out my trending skills
I spent hours trying to get the thing to install, and hours more after people urged me to try a different distro. All in all I think I spent a complete workday just installing with zero result.
As a matter of interest, and bearing in mind that you're posting as AC, what issues did you encounter, and with which distro?
Even back in the '90s when many of us had to struggle with unsupported hardware, we could usually get some sort of usable Linux box up and running. Nowadays, I tend to find that pretty much everything "just works" with kernels supplied out of the box.
The reverse is often also true. As a senior engineer, I'm aware of older tools and subtleties that a developer may not know. Sanitizing inputs, the differences between the tools in the installed operating system, and those within the installer environment itself are excellent examples. For Fedora and Red Hat, most people installing Linux are unaware that you can hit "Ctrl-Alt-F2" to get an active shell in the installation environment, a shell with which one can probe and even reconfigure disks and network devices manually, then hit "Ctrl-Alt-F1" to get back to the installation console or use commands like "Ctrl-Alt-F6" to get back to the X based login, They're also unaware that you can stop just before rebooting and use the same "Ctrl-Alt-Fn" commands to do some manual fine tuning of your configuration before that reboot. But this sort of workaround is counter to the new Fedora installer model, even though it's vital for dealing with attached storage or critical kernel patches.
I applaud many of Fedora's open source and development efforts: partners and colleagues I work with certainly benefit from bleeding edge access to such tools to test, modify, and patch in production and personal use. But my test last weekend of this installer is tha it is burdensome. They've lost track of the idea that the installer is not there to show off technological expertise of the developers. It's there to accomplish distinct, linear tasks that need to be extremely robust and not dependent on complex additional toolkits.
Yes, but if the installation can be modified to work for non-technical people too, why not do it?
I remember seeing a ncurses [or something like that] display with RH 6. It was my first Linux attempt, and it never worked until I became experienced enough to figure out the correct settings for it.
testing out my trending skills
We do NOT want our software to be widely used by people who contribute nothing. What good does that do us? You are not a customer. (Unless of course you are a paying customer). You are the recipient of a gift. Freeloaders using our work, while refusing to donate $10, or edit the wiki, or translate something, or run a proper test suite are NOT beneficial to OSS programmers. Quite the opposite. You're just another oddball configuration I have to support, and another piece of idiot-proofing I have to add to the GUI, with no benefit to me. We don't want it to be widely used, we want a wide base of CONTRIBUTORS.
Funny that you mention contribution: I've contributed with loads of my time to GNOME 2.x, mainly doing translation and docs but also with the occasional bug report and developer feedback, and guess what happened when I, like scores of other people following GNOME development, expressed criticism of the direction Gnome Shell was going? To use an euphemism, we were ignored and/or told to use something else. So much for the "we want CONTRIBUTORS" theory! Needless to say, I'm not a GNOME user anymore, $DEITY forbid that I hinder their vision!
Not that I subscribe to your "we want contributors, don't give **** about other kind of users" theory: if I contributed nothing but express valid criticism, well THAT'S MY CONTRIBUTION and you'd be an idiot to ignore it; vice versa, if I pay you $$$ and my suggestions are utter garbage, you'd be an idiot to accept them. Considering your attitude, perhaps you should limit circulation of your software to your closest pals and relatives, and delight them with your programming skills. The rest of the world will carry on, believe me.
Rehdon
Completely agree.
Why would I give a hoot what Richard stallman wants? Do you spend your day trying to please Richard Stallman? I sure don't.
Except that you are not even thinking fully. The people who you claim "contribute nothing" actually contribute a lot. They are free testers of your product. It in and of itself is a very valuable asset to have. The people who dont even give valuable feedback should be the target of your ire, not people who do.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I'm always curious what people find bad about Gnome 3 - it's about the best desktop environment I've used IMHO. There are a few niggles:
1. They have removed some options for the sake of simplicity which really shouldn't have been removed, and wouldn't have made things more complex if they were there. For example, not having a "disabled" option in the DPMS timeout is a WTF, as is hiding the "Power off" option until you press the magic "Alt" key (with no visual cues that you could press Alt to get at it).
Power off is now visible by default in 3.6, so this niggle has been fixed.
3. They've abolished minimise. However, shading windows is still possible and that's almost as good.
You can re-enable the minimise button with GNOME Tweak Tool. However, because there is no taskbar work-alike, minimised windows don't visibly "go anywhere" and you have to alt-tab or use the Activities view to switch back to them.
4. Focus stealing is a problem - Compiz/Beryl did a much better job at stopping this.
Really? I have no issues in this regard.
I should mention that I thought Gnome 2 was pretty much the worst DE I've ever used - that seemed to be an exercise in copying the worst bits of Windows and removing any options that might make it tollerable. Up until Gnome 3, I was using E17, largely because it was light, fast and just got out of my way when I wanted to get stuff done.
I found GNOME 2 incredibly useful. In fact, if you liked E17 because it got out of your way, I'm surprised you're so happy with GNOME 3, where the shell forcibly takes over whenever you use the Activities view to switch windows/launch things. That doesn't fit with my definition of getting out of the way. Then again, I never stuck with the default panel layout in GNOME 2. I had a single top panel, with the application menu on the left, clock/calendar, a selection of quick launchers, the workspace switcher, and the window menu - no taskbar. So in some ways, it actually resembled GNOME 3 more than the default GNOME 2 layout, which is why the new minimise behaviour doesn't bother me.
What *does* bother me in 3.6, and has me worried for the future, is the stupid application menu in the top panel. Some apps use it, some don't; for those that do, there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind what goes in menus attached to the application itself, and what goes in the menu attached to the panel. Desktop applications which aren't part of the GNOME suite will probably never use it, and it doesn't work the same way as the panel menu in Unity, so I can only imagine the fragmentation getting worse, not better. Also the keyboard shortcut for it is annoying (super-F10 or something equally unintuitive), undiscoverable and I believe unconfigurable. When I first saw mock-ups of GNOME Shell, I didn't think I would like it at all, but now it's a reality I actually do quite like it, with the exception of the panel menu. I don't like the direction they're taking the application suite, with a tendency towards hiding menus, removing the titlebar from maximised windows (so how do you un-maximise with the mouse?), and other misguided "simplifications".
I think you are making a bad comparison, if the installer is broken many people will not try fedora and if they don't use fedora they will not contribute to fedora.
presumably fedora 17 had a working installer so this is a regression, If the installer isn't fixed you will see less new users and some existing users will migrate to something else. This doesn't equate to someone whining about a gift more a developer who has decided to take a dump over the fedora community. Logically the other developers who worked on other parts of fedora won't even see their contribution used because of the poorly developed installer.
I guess either the developer who made the installer can fix it or someone else will write an alternative because if there are people willing to work on fedora , there will people willing to fix the problems.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Is the installer different than before? Yes, it is. Does that make it counter-intuitive? No. The only issue I had that could be related to it being counter-intuitive was if you wanted to manually partition your drive, the text on the button to proceed did not change and it looked like you were going to still have the installer create the partitions.
At the local school, we've got 5th and 6th graders who installed it without problem, except for the partitioning confusion mentioned above. My brother, who is definitely not one to be called computer literate installed it, too.
Maybe the problem is that what long term users "think" is intuitive is actually not. Gnome 3 faced similar complaints with gnome-shell and Ubuntu with their Unity interface. In the early days of Linux, it had the reputation of not being user-friendly because the community would shout RTFM every time somebody asked a question. It seems that attitude still persists, it just manifests itself differently. Now, anytime something changes that makes linux more accessible to an average computer user (not necessarily an average linux user), there is an outcry.
It seems it is only counter-intuitive and unusable for those who want to keep linux as something for the elite instead of the masses.
"Or, instead of forking, contribute a patch or two to improve things."
Good advice for non-desktop oriented projects or the random bug or two, but I don't think patches will work in this case.
Igor's pretty much charitable about the rough spots of the new Fedora release. He reserves his venom for the look-and-feel of the Gnome 3.x desktop that's at the heart of the default Fedora install. So how do you patch a GUI that you consider "counterintutive and confusing" unless you fork it?
The people who you claim "contribute nothing" actually contribute a lot. They are free testers of your product. It in and of itself is a very valuable asset to have.
That is not valuable to me at all. It already works for me, on my hardware. You testing it for your use case, on your hardware, benefits YOU. It doesn't benefit me one bit, not if you stop there. There is another step or two you can easily take to make a contribution of it, though. If you stop at using the software, and pretednign that using=testing, it's a giant PITA to be expected to support hardware that I don't even have access to. If you really think that's beneficial, explain to me how I can eat your test on your hardware for lunch, or how your use case keeps me warm. It doesn't.
If you at least submit a careful, specific issue report that will probably be useful to YOU. What's useful to me, what fills my belly, is if you get me a breakfast taco. I write better software when I'm not hungry, so that also benefits you. As far as using/testing, if you take that "using" and go a step further and write documentation based on how you use it, that benefits the community, including me, because that saves me the time of typing out answers to questions. Also, if you take the results of actual careful testing (using != testing) and submit a careful bug report that _might_ be useful to me, if I happen to be affected by the same bug. Having people simply use software I write does no good for me or anyone else, though.
So when you use software that's poorly documented, either a) write up what you figured out about how to use it or b) get honest with yourself and admit you're useless in that context, not useful. It's okay, just be honest with yourself and others. I'm not useful in regards to Gimp - I just use it. I am useful in the context of the kernel, because I help with development, just a little bit.
Power off is now visible by default in 3.6, so this niggle has been fixed.
I'm aware of that, it was just one example of several similar WTFs - I just can't figure out what they were thinking to implement that kind of misfeature in the first place.
You can re-enable the minimise button with GNOME Tweak Tool. However, because there is no taskbar work-alike, minimised windows don't visibly "go anywhere" and you have to alt-tab or use the Activities view to switch back to them.
As you point out, minimised windows are essentially lost as far as the UI goes, which makes enabling it a bit pointless - adding a panel to the overview screen with all your minimised windows in would've been a good idea. I don't subscribe to the whole "move them to another workspace" idea that the G3 devs were pushing as the replacement for minimise - moving a load of windows to another workspace, and then finding them again later is a lot more effort than minimising them.
However, since we still have window shade mode, I'm not that bothered by this one.
4. Focus stealing is a problem - Compiz/Beryl did a much better job at stopping this.
Really? I have no issues in this regard.
Stuff focus-steals (by means of popping up a new window that automagically gets focus even though it wasn't the focussed application to begin with) with reasonable regularity for me.
In fact, if you liked E17 because it got out of your way, I'm surprised you're so happy with GNOME 3, where the shell forcibly takes over whenever you use the Activities view to switch windows/launch things. That doesn't fit with my definition of getting out of the way.
Well yes and no. The Gnome shell largely _is_ "out of the way" - the only Gnome stuff visible most of the time is the bar at the top of the screen, which is much smaller than the old panel. I have to actively ask for the activities screen, so it doesn't get in my way when I don't want it (yes, I know the old panel was hideable). I guess the main thing is that the in-your-face bits of Gnome 3, such as activities, tend to do more or less exactly what I want so I don't mind them being in my face, whereas with many other DEs I've tried the in-your-face bits seemed to mostly just get in the way.
I suppose the one bit of Gnome 3 that does get in the way for me is the notification bar. It pops up and covers things I'm working on (working primarilly in terminal windows means that the most important bit of the window is often right at the bottom, which is the bit that gets covered by the notification bar). Also I tend to find that Empathy's IM notifications pop up when I'm not looking and then vanish without trace so I don't actually see them until I manually bring up the notification bar. That may have been fixed though - as mentioned I'm running Fedora 16, so not up with the latest version of Gnome 3. I think its hard to get the right balance for notifications, to some extent it would be nice to have eye tracking hardware on the computer that can figure out when you've seen a notification and can automagically get rid of it.
What *does* bother me in 3.6, and has me worried for the future, is the stupid application menu in the top panel.
I sincerely hope this isn't going the way of OS X - detatching an application's menus from the app's window itself is one of the worst things you can do.
1. It is completely incompatible with focus-follows-mouse.
2. It means you have to move the mouse much further - this is especially a big deal with large/multiple screens - I don't want to have to move my mouse from the bottom-right of the right-most 24" screen to the top-left of the left-most 24" screen in order to perform some menu action.
3. You have to be doubley sure which window is focussed before you start poking around at the menu.
To be completely honest, the bits that Gnome 3 see
http://blog.nexusuk.org
So how do you patch a GUI that you consider "counterintutive and confusing" unless you fork it?
The installer GUI is python code. You can patch it the same way you'd patch any other code. Except in this case, one complaint is inconsistent fonts, so you don't even have to be a programmer. Just search-replace font names.
Alternatively, the GUI is mainly developed using the Glade"IDE", http://glade.gnome.org/ so you can edit the GUI graphically, right in Glade. Glade generates Python source, from from there run "diff -Nrup" just like any other patch.
Do you have any idea how many FOSS programs from how many authors/projects I use every day? Let me just name a few: Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla), LaTeX (TUG), bash/zsh (a community), gfortran/gcc (GNU), vim (another community), ArchLinux (yet another community), GIMP (GNU), Inkscape (yet another community), and the list goes on.
In which case you a productive member of the OSS community. When I contribute to Firefox, I'll have reason to consider your wishes because we're working together - my code and your code need to play nicely together. I won't have any reason to worry about what Apple thinks of my Firefox code, because their Safari code doesn't affect my Firefox code.
From that review, it appears they just barely beat Windows 8 at bad UI design and counter-intuitive functionality. That's hard to do!
I wrote a whole paragraph answering that. Ways non-programmers can contribute:
edit the wiki
answer newbie's questions on the forum
translate the documentation
submit careful, specific bug reports
buy the programmer a breakfast taco
seed the torrent (on purpose, after you're done downloading)
pitch in on the hosting bill
want me to support your specific hardware? Send me one so I can work on it.
With both Redhat/Fedora and Canonical/Ubuntu determined to go the touchy-feely route, it's a wonder these two companies don't just roll out their own-branded/skinned Android fork similar to Amazon's Kindle Fire OS. Android 4.x is at least a bit more pleasant to look at and is not that MUCH harder to use with a mouse and a keyboard than Gnome 3.X/Unity. And you get the familiarity of an already widely dispersed graphical interface.
PS: Cory probably thinks differently than you: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/17/computing-opensource
and the almost jackboot militancy with which one is forced into either Gnome or KDE was my primary impetus for leaving Fedora. Sure, gentoo might require a bit more patience and understanding but linux has always been about knowledge and power. in the words of Tonnerre Lombard:
"if you believe in the principles behind UNIX and Open Source, please don't write software which requires any of the Gnome/KDE and DBus API. Writing X11 programs with xcb and proper RPC APIs like SUNRPC or Thrift should be more than good enough. "
http://blog.ngas.ch/archives/2011/12/13/the_destructive_desktop__mdash_linux_in_trouble/index.htmlhttp://bassdrive.com/v2/streams/BassDrive.pls
Good people go to bed earlier.
The installer's crap, I'll give him that. I've just given it a run through to see whether he makes fair points, and I think he actually misses some, but not all his complaints make sense to me.
KDE LiveCD worked just fine for me, logging in automatically. No errors about networks, no warnings about /var being full. No complaints about audio not working. Was he perhaps running with minimal RAM such that the LiveCD couldn't work properly. I couldn't get any similar failings even with dropping RAM down to 512Mbytes, which is a half the 1Gbyte recommended. But given his screenshot and /home being on /tmpfs I don't see how else it could report less than 100Mbytes free. Running with 512Mbytes shows a nominal 220Mbytes available in your home directory. I faintly wonder whether that's actually the source of most of his liveCD issues.
The progress bar showed Installing Software 100% but the bar wasn't all the way across. But that's because the progress bar is showing all install progress, not just installing software. The progress bar seemed sane to me. All in, the installer is less functional than the old installer, and certainly less clear. Having Done and Continue buttons just isn't helpful. After clicking Done, you'll be returned to a page showing out of date information, and you have to wait for it to update. This makes no sense, I'm with him on that. I get what they're trying to present to you, and it's possibly even useful in the way they've done it, but it's definitely less clear.
Some images are oddly low resolution, but I can live with that, it's only aesthetics. It needs fixing, but it's not worth holding up a release.
His complaints with the installed system also seem a little unfair. He installs easylife (not part of fedora), the complains that the repofusion repo hasn't been set up correctly, when that's been done by easylife... His flash/mp3 complaints fit into that same category. That's very much blaming windows for itunes not playing back FLAC files.
So I'd say that the installer sucks and was a mistake to put into F18, but things aren't necessarily quite as portrayed in that review.
jh
I will say that both Ubuntu and Fedora are going along those lines.
Once upon a time the prevaliing community mocked MS for their over-complicated underpinnings with complex inter-component APIs, binary registry, etc etc. We reveled in our straightforward, plain-text configuration that was trivial to examine, if not a tad incovenient for developers to parse and human error could produce confusing errors for the 'uninitiated', but experts had the easiest time writing one-off scripts to do whatever they wanted.
Now, we have things like dbus, network manager, dconf, and systemd effectively mimicking the behavior the community once marked. Now ludicrous 'dbus-send' commands are the only recourse for scripted workflows, the once simple task of writing an init script is now somewhat complicated because they really want a correct dependency graph to speed up boot (a noble goal, but the approach makes administration more difficult). The software stack strongly suggests *not* manipulating resolv.conf at all, instead manipulating some local instance of dnsmasq.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've been a Fedora/Redhat user since 1998 (5.1 Manhattan). With first Gnome 3 and now this, I think the time has come to look somewhere else... :C
....aborted attempts at installing from DVD.
I tried to perform an upgrade from F17 via a DVD (burned from iso). After reading the FedoraProject wiki and seeing that preupgrade had been deprecated in favour of FedUp, I figured I'd go with the less fragile method of burning media from an ISO.
To make a long story short, after several failures, I gave FedUp a try, and it worked like a charm
I'm not sure what I would have done had I been performing a new installation, the installer was very flaky, and once even refused to boot. the whole experience has left me worrying about the fate of Fedora.
Come on Fedora team, you have produced much better.
IMHO the panel menu in GNOME 3.6 is actually *worse* than in Unity or OS X. In Unity & OS X, I believe, the menu that appears there is what would normally appear at the top level in the current window - so the implementation works for all applications which use a supported GUI toolkit, and the menu items are at least visible, albeit not attached to the application itself.
In GNOME, the panel menu is not automatically populated with the application's top-level menu items; its contents are application-specific. The contents are not always visible, but appear in a pop-up menu attached to the application icon (you know, that useless-looking thing that currently just serves to show the name of the currently focussed app). Because the contents are both application-specific and hidden by default, it's not obvious at all what (if anything) is there for any given app, and when you *do* open the menu (using the mouse or the unchangeable keyboard shortcut), none of the items in the menu have accelerator keys.
In short, it's a usability nightmare with no redeeming features, and I don't know why they're pushing ahead with it.
Ljubuncic's experiences with software are usually the opposite of mine. I installed F18 on multiple drives with multiple partitions with none of the issues of problems he discusses. That's not the first time that's happened.
The new Anaconda has taken a lot of flack. Some is justified. Much of it seems based on people who are, first, mad that it isn't the old Anaconda; second, mad that it doesn't work like the old Anaconda and makes them think about how to use it, and, third, think their experience with the old Anaconda means it was "intuitive". It wasn't. Expecting software to be "intuitive" is just falling victim to sales-pitch hokum.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
And thus the once-mighty Red Hat server fails to keep up with competition, or even with its own previous versions. It seems like it's been falling apart ever since Erik Troan left the company, but I wonder if that was cause or effect, you know?
So many poorly executed steps backwards... up2date replaced by yum, openssl replaced by nss, OpenLDAP replaced by FreeIPA, anacron bundled with cron and installed by default, the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine... it seems like Fedora/RHEL is turning into a college student's laptop distribution, where it largely fails to compete with Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu. I mean, come on, how much offline optimization does a server OS need? Anacron, NM, and user credential caching all turned on by default? It's madness. Try to get a recent Fedora or RHEL to work without a GUI or a caching LDAP client, for a quick and easy real good time (not).
With ever increasing dependency chains (anybody still remember mocking Ms-windows DLL hell?) "more stuff to fail" has become the Fedora way.... every version looks more like HP-UX or Windows, with any semblance of elegance or manageable simplicity eroding away like a rich man's taxpayer-insured beachfront.
With the old IDE buses, names like /dev/hda and /dev/hdb depended on the physical connection and were permanent, as long as you didn't move the disks around. Currently, the sda, sdb... names do not depend on the physical hardware and are not guaranteed to stay the same every boot.
Size and manufacturer is the only reasonable way of referring to the drives. Would serial number be better? (Clearly, in this case listing existing partitions would be better.)
Please tell me what projects are you working with, I don't want to "freeload" your shit. Seriously.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
And don't release it.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
There used to be a city/timezone drop down list as well, besides the little map.
I know Anaconda was in RH6, my first Linux was a RH6 based distro and the screens mentioned anaconda.
Also reviews, negative or positive, are of major value to end users looking for information about which distribution/tool/application/whatever to try.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
I have installed 18 on two machines with no problems- the installer did not seem like much progress from what was before, but it did the job. That angry blogger is probably just fishing for hits on his pages - not much ads there so he may be in need of some cash.
Fedora likes big /boot. I had a preupgrade fail on me once because apparently I didn't have enough space in /boot for it to do "something" in it, still not for sure what. Think it was the F15>F16 transition. Anyway it left my system unusable....but I always burn a DVD beforehand, just in case, so used that to install and told it to leave my "/home" alone.
The F16>F17 and F17>F18 transitions via preupgrade/fedup were fine, well except for not having the nvidia driver installedlike it should have been (I use rpmfusion) so I had to manually install that in single user mode to get GDM to show up, and they changed pulse (actually fixed it) so a change I made in /etc/pulse/default.pa to get HDMI audio working in previous versions wasn't needed (and made pulse malfunction)
And the new XFCE version didn't get along with my f17 XFCE panel configuration, had to fix it a little.
That was pretty much it.
Well, developers just do what managers say them to do. But Fedora sales/management people are just crazy. They intentionally want to be may be more crazy then MS sales people with Win 8 :)
Nvidia driver just won't work on F18 - I had to go to nouveau - I simply can't find a way to make this driver work
[CronoCloud@wutai ~]$ cat
Fedora release 18 (Spherical Cow)
[CronoCloud@wutai ~]$ glxinfo | grep -i nvidia
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL version string: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 304.64
OpenGL shading language version string: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
Install RPMfusion repo
sudo yum install akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia
that should do the trick, double check to make sure nouveau is blacklisted in the kernel boot line.
That cange came with F17, not F18.
I tried to upgrade a virtualbox image, didn't work for me either. I tried a couple times but I was too annoyed to continue.
Not sure what the issue was, but telling me not enough space, not letting me use my existing partitions or even letting me reformat the drive, clearly a broken installer.
No idea who is testing this on the Fedora team, but damn, if this cant pass the drunk admin test you failed.
Many FOSS developers put donation links on their websites. Many users donate.
Friendliness and openness towards users leads to donations. Hostility doesn't.
I don't know what software you write, but:
a) Do you even have a donation link?
b) Are you hostile towards users? (I think I know the answer.)
In any case, from the sounds of it in this thread, you don't seem to care if another person on earth uses your software.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Oh, and as for "freeloaders" not being beneficial, consider this:
Firefox was established to end IE6's reign of terror on the web, and bring web standards back into play, benefiting everyone. Would they have accomplished that without the millions of "freeloaders" who eagerly downloaded and installed it, slowly chipping away at IE's numbers?
I realize that doesn't apply to every case, but it certainly does in some.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I'm not a Fedora user and installed this in a VM this morning. The installer Ui was a shock and looks like crap, but it was no big deal to figure out. It was typical of all that RedHat/GNOME minimalist crap.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You must have installed on a bare disk and/or didn't care about the disk layout. That to me is the most atrocious part of the installer. Trying doing a resinstall without out wiping out your /home ... be sure to cross your fingers when you hit go because you'll have no idea whether it is going to preserve that partition or not.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
I totally agree! That's why I post report bugs whenever I can.
This is what us non-devs should be expected to do. If the program ask for bug reports (anonymize and) send it! If it's something important file a bug manually.
It is more likely the programmers would not be amused by a patch that didn't follow the internal culture.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I am browsing slashdot while waiting for my installation of F18 right this minute. I have to admit that in most areas the installer is not that bad. Simple to use and free from clutter, forsaking the wizard for a central control console is quite appealing, especially given that it unifies all the options in a single place. I will, however, agree that there exists two or three glaring flaws in the installer to my mind, nl. the fact that you cannot easily choose the partitioning method of your selected installation drive, the fact that you are tied to seemingly arbitrary package selections instead of a more dynamic, 'choose which apps you want to install' option and the fact that you can only configure root password during the copy process. Other than these concerns I am finding the installer to be a joy to work with.
At the bottom of this article about how God-awful the interface is, I see an advertisement for Windows 8, the poster child for tablet-wannabe UI badness. "Develop for the Windows Store," it says, in white text against the same retina-searing shade of magenta I used to indicate transparency in all my game sprites because there's no way I could ever conceive of using that color. I thought to myself, how fitting that should appear on an article about top Linux distros following Windows into the abyss.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
On the other hand, sometimes projects use "submit the bug report in the proper format" as a way to filibuster the bug report, giving them an excuse to ignore it "because it's not in the proper format".
And then there are the cases where it's not clear whether something is a bug or poorly documented. I had this happen to me with a font problem on an old version of Openoffice; one setting wasn't affecting one font and I had no idea whether I had missed some obscure setting to change the font in that one place, or if it actually was a bug.
Users aren't complaining because they want to be whiny or difficult. They're complaining because they see a flaw. If you want your software to be widely accepted, listen. If your software is just coding for self satisfaction, and you don't care about user adoption, then don't listen.
The problem here is one person's flaw is another person's need, or want. It can drive a developer/programmer batty trying to satisfy everyone.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Even when both user and dev are programmers of the same skill level there's a huge gulf in knowledge. A 5 hour patch for the user might be a 5 minute job for a dev since they've already learned the code. So I generally use my dev skills to give a really good description of the problem and test cases. Usually the only times I write a patch are when it's a feature specifically for me, or I've gone into so much detail finding the bug I already found the fix.
It may be a specific case but when I hear or read others asking how to get experience programming frequently some replies are to see what bugs have been submitted to FOSS projects, pick one, and submit a patch to the project leaders.
I consider that to be a good contribution to the community and on projects I've managed in the past I really appreciated users who gave good bug reports.
I agree, however is there a documented methodology or procedure that is easy to find and use for those who want to submit bug reports? Of all the tymes I've read how users should submit bug reports I have not yet read how to submit these reports.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Even when both user and dev are programmers of the same skill level there's a huge gulf in knowledge. A 5 hour patch for the user might be a 5 minute job for a dev since they've already learned the code. So I generally use my dev skills to give a really good description of the problem and test cases. Usually the only times I write a patch are when it's a feature specifically for me, or I've gone into so much detail finding the bug I already found the fix.
It may be a specific case but when I hear or read others asking how to get experience programming frequently some replies are to see what bugs have been submitted to FOSS projects, pick one, and submit a patch to the project leaders.
And that's a great idea to gain programming experience, just realize that it's more of a way to learn programming than a way to make a big contribution, you basically need to find a bug that's easy to fix (so you can handle it), and not a lot of people care about (or someone else would have made the easy patch first).
The best bet is to find some little one or two dev project on SF or something (try a niche end user project like a podcast manager), there the code should be
easier to understand, the bugs should be easier to find and fix without side effects, and the work will be more important to the project since it's less likely to be an obscure function no-one uses.
I consider that to be a good contribution to the community and on projects I've managed in the past I really appreciated users who gave good bug reports.
I agree, however is there a documented methodology or procedure that is easy to find and use for those who want to submit bug reports? Of all the tymes I've read how users should submit bug reports I have not yet read how to submit these reports.
Falcon
Not entirely since every bug is different but the basic rule is make it as easy to reproduce as possible (I often try to start from the latest version of the app with a vanilla configuration then find the simplest way to recreate the issue). Including info like logs, versions, steps, configurations is always helpful, don't worry about including too much since the dev will generally know what's important and ignore the rest (or ask for the missing bits).
I stole this Sig
Even when both user and dev are programmers of the same skill level there's a huge gulf in knowledge. A 5 hour patch for the user might be a 5 minute job for a dev since they've already learned the code. So I generally use my dev skills to give a really good description of the problem and test cases. Usually the only times I write a patch are when it's a feature specifically for me, or I've gone into so much detail finding the bug I already found the fix.
It may be a specific case but when I hear or read others asking how to get experience programming frequently some replies are to see what bugs have been submitted to FOSS projects, pick one, and submit a patch to the project leaders.
And that's a great idea to gain programming experience, just realize that it's more of a way to learn programming than a way to make a big contribution, you basically need to find a bug that's easy to fix (so you can handle it), and not a lot of people care about (or someone else would have made the easy patch first).
The best bet is to find some little one or two dev project on SF or something (try a niche end user project like a podcast manager), there the code should be easier to understand, the bugs should be easier to find and fix without side effects, and the work will be more important to the project since it's less likely to be an obscure function no-one uses.
I don't have much experience programming myself but I've been thinking about trying my hand with CinePaint, a fork of GIMP with deep color editing. It used to be included in Ubuntu but when Debian dropped it so did Ubuntu and that's what I use now. I could try something easier but I want to do deep color editing of my photographs, and GIMP does not do that. The only other bit map graphics software that does deep color is Krita but it's lacking as a photo editor.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Why is providing feedback whining to you? I find it to be more helpful than random patches or other contributions.
Thing is, I don't want everyone and their brother submitting patches to a project I work on. I prefer the coding to be done by a core group of people I've vetted and know they are willing to maintain what they submit. I'd much rather get feedback to see if my ideas are headed in the right way my userbase wants it to be headed. Sure, I don't always go in that direction, but it's helpful to see what they want. And it way beats a poorly written patch submitted by someone who doesn't want to maintain it.
Do you want experienced people? How do they get that experience if not by programming? As I've heard or read and repeated myself a good way to get experience is by writing patches for FOSS projects.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My time is worth $55/hr. Rather than wasting it translating an app into a foreign language that doesn't do what I want it to do anyway, I could just pay a couple of hours worth of my time to get something I want.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is exactly what gives Linux a bad name: revisiting something that worked before and really doesn't need to be ''improved", and then slinging in some glitzy pre-beta code and dropping it smack in the middle of a distribution channel for production code. That's something dumb that only hobbyists and amateurs do.
Distros are meant for people who don't want to waste their time tinkering with a ton of software that has already been sorted out. The installer on a Distro should 'just work', and work predictable and reproduceably.
There is some room for improvement on the Debian installer, as you generally have to sit through the whole thing since it asks you questions as it does things, instead of asking all the questions up front then allowing you to wander off while it does its thing unattended. Though it's not a huge deal as I don't have to install my OS that often and the Debian installer is pretty fast (ignoring network speed problems which isn't its fault).
I just got a new PC with Windows 7 and (non-secure) EFI booting. It seems like only Ubuntu-derived distros know how to set up to be booted on such a system. And it's kind of hit-and-miss with a lot of manual intervention required even at that. Apparently there are more hurdles involved with EFI than just 'turn off secure boot' - a lot more. And there is no consistency between firmware implementations, so no place to go to get a straightforward explanation of what to do. If you're struggling with this too, let me recommend rEFInd - not magic, but its author at least tries his darndest to explain why it's all so hard and what you can do about it. And it works (that helps).
I'm typing this on my MacBook which dual-boots, Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 12.04. I use rEFIt as the boot selector. With Snow Leopard already installed I only had one problem installing 64 bit 12.04. For some reason it would not install when I tried. So I tried installing 11.10 and it wouldn't install, then 11.04 didn't work either. Finally I got 10.10 to install. From there I upgraded to first 11.04, then 11.10, and finally to 12.04. But when I got it installed it was 32 bit not 64 bit. Just for the heck of it I inserted the 64 bit 12.04 DVD and tried again. This tyme it installed. So unless I used a different disk the second tyme than I used the first tyme and the first was bad, I don't know why it didn't work at first.
Anyway, I ended up with Mint
I may try Mint, with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE but I'm not sure. I plan on trying Arch Linux though, it includes software Debian based distros don't, CinePaint. As a photographer I want CinePaint, and GIMP does not cut it as a professional print photo editor.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Granted, it would be nice if the questions all came up front.
How has PC-BSD been dealing w/ the UEFI issue? Anything like Canonical or RedHat, or something else?
You have to acknowledge some of his points. Showing two identical disk names without any further distinction is retarded, there's just no way around it.
Not to mention that they were in reverse order, so good luck guessing it if you don't know this :p
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
But there are also users that don't want to learn, but just want to use.
And for such user to start installing a new OS he doesn't know and doesn't want to learn by himself is really, really stupid... You just want to use, no learning -> you hire someone to install it.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Sure, if you can do it without making it blow goats.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Yeah, well maybe end users will?
And don't you go defaming the fedora developers, they might be smarter than you give credit for... I used to like Fedora - though it's idiocy like this that made me switch to debian.
Anyway, reviews have another purpose besides of waking up the developers - telling the end users what you thought of it. And thank god there are plenty of reviewers around the web.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Igor's review of Fedora 18 was done with a mindset to finding all the flaws, and blowing up the imporatance.
Fedora 18 anaconda is version 0.9, a brand new design, a design to cover hardware that Igor does not own. Hardware with UEFI, arm, and more.
I will be as polite as I can, but Igor's review is as useful as a tit on a bull.
If he said, My sytem is a 4gig computer, with dual core operating system and xxx gigs of diskspace, and I analyzed both the 32 and 64bit systems using both the DVD and the Live DVD versions, then, for me he has credabilty.
FYI, Fedora has spins, which means versions tailored for specific users.
I use a Russian Spin ( www.rpmfusion.org, paragraph Users, and select the Russian Spin). This spin has all the extra installed software that Igor wrote about, and more. It is a delight. This spin contains all the codecs, dvd player stuff, svn, and much more goodies. I took the gnome version, did the DVD installation for both 32 and 64bit systems where minimum memory available was 3.5gigs, and adequate disk space. In one evaluation I used btfrs, in another Standard. (anaconda disk usage options).
Once installed and following two updates using yum, I redid creating the grub.cfg file. That version of Fedora 18 32bit resides alongside Fedora 17, Ubuntu, Mint14 KDE and Debian KDE/Gnome.
I am not particularly thrilled with Gnome 3.x that comes with Fedora 18, so I installed and I am using Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a delight. As little as one mouse click to start an application or switch windows. With Gnome I used to suffer with Carpal Tunnel problems for the muscle controlling my forefinger always clicking the left mouse button.
Once installed, The Russian version of Fedora 18 is great. If you have an ATI card, there are built-in drivers.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
For some reason the mentality is to make everything more basic and hide options we commonly use, so the new installer is definitely not like it was before. Big blocky icons and very slow, and less intuitive than the old installer because you are forced to click around all over and go in to steps and back to a main screen to look and double check what else needs to be done, in order to continue. The old installer guided the user through the steps in sequence. What also frustrated me is they even stripped out the ability to customize which packages can be installed, such as the graphics suite and other software. LibreOffice was listed, but many other titles were left out. This could be because they are not included on the DVD, I haven't checked. I've used GNU/Linux for almost 16 years and the graphical installers over the years have been changed before, but this one was by far more confusing and took a lot longer to figure out. I can see how it would take a new GNU/Linux user even longer and make them more discouraged and confused.
There's a "detail" link or something like that on that screen to show the actual device names (e.g. "/dev/sda"). It took a bit of wondering but I found it because I really really wanted to :-)
Thanks very much for at least sympathizing, you'd be surprised how many people don't!
:-( Yeah... it's a lot easier to "explain away" issues than actually try to help with them. From the point of view of the person "helping", it "solves" the problem. I see this kind of thinking a lot on LUG mailing lists -- it's frustrating.
I did ask for help getting things running in the #freebsd channel but once I admitted I had made the "mistake" of buying a Windows PC with UEFI the most helpful answer I got was to "buy another computer," but in...less polite terms.
Most hardware these says comes with UEFI (or soon will), but more to the point you cannot guarantee that you will be able to know whether the hardware comes with UEFI or not. And regardless, you own that hardware now, so telling you to buy new hardware isn't reasonable. I forget if FreeBSD requires a different solution than the Grub2 shim, but hopefully there's a solution for it soon too.
I personally wish that I hadn't learned about UEFI in this manner but I'm glad that I know better now at least -- but there are still plenty of us out there who would like to try other options!
I read about it before running into install trouble because of it, but all that does is remove the surprise factor. ;-)
Most leaders of open source software, like Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond, think RMS is "out there", an extremist. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always extreme. RMS most certainly does not represent most OSS programmers.
I am not speaking on behalf of ALL programmers, of course, but I think a) I represent a large portion (see ESR smart questions, which says the same things I said) and b) most of what I'm saying is simply fact. I said having a lot of non-contributors use my software does not BENEFIT me. That's true whether or not someone WANTS people to use my software. I could WANT it, but still it provides me no benefit - I can't eat download counts, I can't fill my gas tank with lusers.
Only in a very few extreme cases (perhaps a dozen programmers in the world), software that becomes radically popular might help the author achieve a level of popularity that will help them get a nice job. They still have to work the job to get the benefits of it, though. The popularity is only a help, and only in the rarest of cases, less than 1 programmer per million.
Bingo. You could actually pay for what you want, as I suggested in the line you quoted. We're not supposed to talk about that here, though. On Slashdot, you're supposed to steal software and anything else that can't be nailed down or chained up.
Please tell me what projects are you working with, I don't want to "freeload" your shit. Seriously.
As noted higher in the thread, the Linux kernel, Apache and PowerDNS are a few examples. See also Eric S. Raymond's body of work - he has said pretty much the same thing I'm saying - that's great if you find our work useful. We give it to you so it'll be useful to YOU, though. Having you use it isn't generally helpful to US, so being a user doesn't mean you have a leash on me and can demand that I help you with your problem, on your timetable.