Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu

An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developer veteran Alan Cox has lashed out at Red Hat's recent release of Fedora 18. Cox posted comments to his Google+ page saying 'Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen.' He encountered numerous problems with Fedora 18 and then decided to switch to Ubuntu."

Comments

Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[neiras]

Why is this news? Slashdot already covered F18's wacky installer.

F18 is a bleeding-edge testing distribution. People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch. New things get tried in Fedora. Some of them are great; some of them are dubious. It's always been this way. This is surely not news.

We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines; there have been zero issues. The installer was a "WTF? Oh, got it." inconvenience the first time around.

Thanks for the kernels, AC, and you can say what you like, but people whose OS installs get screwed up tend to be louder than those for whom things just work. I wonder if he even bothered to report a bug. Probably not.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

These people have lives.

Duuuh.

[lophophore]

Duuuh.

Never, ever, switch to a Fedora release until it has been out for at least 6 weeks.

I consider Fedora to be (at best) beta-test RHEL. I've been using it for years, and I can tell you, it *always* sucks at release. Always. Give it a month or two for the worst bugs to get addressed, then install it.

Despite its warts, I'll take Fedora 18 for $0 over Windows 8 any day.

Where is everyone?

[Sponge Bath]

I understand that Fedora is an experimental platform for bleeding edge changes, but if you take the perpetual beta status too far, nobody will bother to do your testing.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

Clearly you weren't around for Redhat 5.0, with the libc5->glibc fuckup.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Cox doesn't have to pretend to be 1337 so there's no point in him using Arch.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[uvajed_ekil]

I'm no expert, but I think you're on the right track. Slackware lost its appeal to me a loooong time ago, Ubuntu was never really as good as I wanted it to be, and Fedora has fallen apart as of late. Tried out SUSE, CentOS and Scientific, Mandrake/Mandriva/Connectiva, Debian, and some others over the years, and I'd honestly say Mint is the best thing out there right now, at least for personal use and smaller networks. Mint's is essentially what Ubuntu was supposed to be: it works and isn't ridiculous to setup and maintain.

If you like Ubuntu okay and are frustrated with other distros, you will probably love Mint. I've moved on to Mint's Debian Edition, which still has some unfortunate flaws, but I keep hoping they'll change their focus to the Debian base and just forget Ubuntu. I keep testing new releases when they become available, thinking maybe I'm missing something. Invariably I wipe the test partitions and sleep well knowing Mint works for me, looks how I like, does everything I ask of it, and is reliable. Of course I call this sort of testing "fun," but it reaffirms my OS choice. And BTW, I had high hopes for Fedora 18, but it is a joke.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

You are forgetting systemd and pulseaudio, which also introduces compatibility issues for everyone else as well, when desktop environments start requiring it.

Re:forgot RH7

[hawkinspeter]

I tried that one as well. The package management seems totally broken and there's no SSH. WTF?

Re:forgot RH7

[Jesus_666]

I take it you have never tried to use the Windows 7 installer on a system with more then one SATA drive, then. Let's just say that between bizarre, undocumented requirements (the installer expects to be installed on the first SATA drive; you can select another drive but you'll get an error message after configuring the partitions) and the cryptic error messages given if you don't meet them (something about not finding a system partition) it's clearly not ready for prime time but was shipped regardless. I haven't looked at the Metro one yet but I hope they switched to something more reasonable like Ubiquity. Home-grown installers clearly aren't Redmond's forte.

Once you've got it running it's a mixed bag. The built-in Wine is flat-out awesome (it even has near-perfect compatibility with DirectX) but the preinstalled software is extremely sparse for such a big distro (you don't even get GCC!), for some reason the login screen doesn't allow you to select the window manager, leaving you stuck with the default one... Oh yeah, and you can't even get out of X11 while the system is running. No shell, no nothing. Who does that?

I'd recommend it for compatibility purposes only. If you need Wine for something this is the distro to use. For everything else just use another distro.