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.

Comments

I must agree

[Omnifarious]

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.

Re:I must agree

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Just no. It's perfectly fine to have an opinion, even a bad opinion, and not doing anything past the expression of the opinion. It's not his job to fix Fedora. It's not the job of the users to fix Fedora. It's the job of the team working on it. If someone wants to contribute, good for them, but to each their own. The whole "It's open source, so fix it yourself and shut up" is getting really old. I love open source, but I hate people with your attitude.

Re:I must agree

[quantaman]

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.

'Shut up or fork it' is a criticism I regularly hear directed to people complaining about an Open Source project, and it's a really stupid criticism.

The fact you can fork or even patch doesn't mean you lose the right to complain if you don't.

Complaining offers feedback, it tells the devs what the issues are, both issues they didn't know existed and issues they didn't know were a big problem.

The ability to fork is more of a check on the devs then a regular threat. It stops devs from doing really stupid things that might create a fork or drive people to a new one, and it sometimes lets two projects go in different directions to better serve the userbase.

Remember, users are not the enemy, if you treat them like they are the enemy, well then you won't have enemies for long.

Re:I must agree

[atomican]

Remember, users are not the enemy, if you treat them like they are the enemy, well then you won't have enemies for long.

This is more insightful than you think. It's also pretty damn obvious (but not to discredit you writing it, as it's still a good point as it's apparently not that obvious to a lot of people).

If you treat your users with contempt, they will not deal with you any longer than they have to. Once they can find a way to live without you, they will piss off at the first opportunity. Unfortunately there are many people in the open source community who do think their users are idiots and treat them as the enemy when they complain about the direction some software is taking (GNOME 3, Ubuntu, etc). Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.

Sometimes all a person can do is complain, but that doesn't mean the complaint is baseless. It has a use if it's part of a culmination of complaints as it shows user dissatisfaction. And that can be enough of a sign that things are going down the wrong path in itself.

Re:I must agree

[UltraZelda64]

Don't worry, this same thing exists in proprietary/commercial software, where you are not only paying just for the privilege to even use the software, but you have to hope that their vision doesn't stray too far from you consider appropriate. See Windows 8: If someone slams it and the Metro interface, or even just changes to the way the traditional desktop itself functions, you can guarantee there will be people around to bitch because you're using your right to free speech to criticize a product... that you have to pay an arm and a leg for in the first place!

Fuck them. If someone or something deserves a reality check in the form of a good slamming, then that's exactly what they should get.

Re:I must agree

[pepsikid]

I don't see what was wrong with the old installer. It was straightforward and covered all the bases. This new one was like a frustrating chose-your-own adventure, and left me fearing that I'd skipped over part of the process. I felt like it was fighting me when I wanted to erase various vista, ubuntu 10.10 and dell diag partitions and just give it the whole drive. I asked myself "they delayed the launch 3 months for THIS?". However, I'll probably stick with F18 for now since I'm reading that F19 will not have fallback gui. I use the fallback exclusively since I don't have to install any further guis and gnome 3's vino vnc server sucks rancid goat balls when I'm trying to remote into the desktop.

Re:I must agree

[smash]

Actually apple write stuff that generally works.

Find a mac and reinstall the OS on it some time. It is the epitomy of painless. It is safe by default and will not wipe out your data. It has a consistent UI.

The problem is everyone copying the widget set Apple us, without doing any of the back-end engineering to make it work. IMHO the UI fluff on the mac is the LEAST impressive aspect of OS X - the underlying layers of Quartz, Core storage, fs-events, Grand Central, etc. are all far more impressive in terms of engineering - and while the muppets putting out Fedora are focusing on killing the advantages Linux has by reducing options in the name of UI simplification and BREAKING SHIT in the process, Apple is doing more work in the back end to bring stuff about like SSD caching that solves real world problems (e.g.. "i has an ssd and a hd and but don't want to manually manage storage").

Linux devs! Stop breaking Linux to make it UI-simple. Make the back end stuff work properly.

If i want to use something that looks like a Mac, it better WORK like a Mac underneath. Something that looks like a mac but doesn't work is not going to cut it. The UI is very much a secondary reason as to why I am a Mac user today, and used to be a Linux user prior to 2006.

Try OpenSuSE!

[NegroponteJ.Rabit]

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.

Re:No contribution = whining about a gift

[Kenshin]

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.

Re:Or submit a patch or two

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a patch in Apache but it's not like I expect everyone to be able to do that. You do realize only a select set of people are competent enough to do this right?

Re:Mint a good alternative for traditionalists

[shutdown -p now]

If you wind up with the same packages, you're doing it wrong. The reason to compile from scratch is that you can tell the compiler to use optimizations appropriate for the processor you're using.

Have you done profiling on any packages built with all those ultra-specialized optimization flags to see how much it actually benefits you?