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

forgot RH7

[dltaylor]

THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

Ugly, ugly incompatibilities abounded. Even "build from source" didn't work very well, since the compiler was not really "C", or any other language.

Re:forgot RH7

[ruir]

I concur that. I switched to Debian after the fiasco of RH7 and never looked back.

Re: forgot RH7

[xose]

Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html

Re: forgot RH7

[fph il quozientatore]

Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html

The flamewar is strong with these ones.

Re: forgot RH7

[fluffy99]

Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html

He's right about ugly incompatibilities. Old code which complied fine and compiled on other platforms didn't work on RH7. That the underlying reason was non-standards compliant programming and a much stricter compiler didn't change the problem. It also didn't help that the compiler was enforcing c++ standards against c code.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

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

Re:forgot RH7

[sourcerror]

Fedora Core 4 also had a fucked up compiler. You couldn't compile a kernel with it.

Re:forgot RH7

[donaldm]

I concur that. I switched to Debian after the fiasco of RH7 and never looked back.

You do know that RH 7 came out in 2000 and was discontinued after RH 9 in 2003 for Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2. The latest release of RHEL is version 6 which will be supported for 13 years. Go to the Redhat site, they don't hide anything if you don't believe me.

Personally I don't really like the Debian distributions and prefer the Fedora/Redhat ones since I have never had many problems with Fedora Core 7 and have updated regularly all the way to Fedora 18 which IMHO is actually the best distribution to date although I would say that the new installer is a little bit cosmetically challenged, however it does what it is supposed to do and it does it well. I do think Alan Cox's statement saying that the new installer is unusable is totally wrong, although I do agree it is different.

For me to go from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 I always do a fresh install of the OS which in this case took me about 45 minutes, then it took me an additional 30 minutes to install all software i use and potentially use. Then it took me about an hour to do the updates on over 1700 packages and during that time I actually did other things such as watching a video and surfing the web on the machine I was updating.

Re:forgot RH7

[arglebargle_xiv]

Personally I don't really like the Debian distributions and prefer the Fedora/Redhat ones since I have never had many problems with Fedora Core 7 and have updated regularly all the way to Fedora 18 which IMHO is actually the best distribution to date although I would say that the new installer is a little bit cosmetically challenged, however it does what it is supposed to do and it does it well. I do think Alan Cox's statement saying that the new installer is unusable is totally wrong, although I do agree it is different.

I'm running a Redmond distribution, Windows 7 I think it's called. It's not bad, reasonably stable, the installer works just fine, has a nice polished look to it, and seems to have built-in Wine support because Office runs fine on it. I've heard it's been forked into something called Metro/Win8 which is pretty unpleasant, so I'll be sticking with the current distro for awhile.

Re:forgot RH7

[dbIII]

the installer works just fine

The installer is a big trap for newbies if you want to use applications on that OS that insist on using the "C:" drive. Some commercial software is very slow to develop and is not compatible with MS Windows 7 unless you take care in the installation to change from the default and install it all in one partition.

Re:forgot RH7

[Bing Tsher E]

I switched to NetBSD after Red Hat 4.3.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

The most egregious abuse that Red Hat has perpetrated upon the Linux community in my humble opinion - and this is hard because there are just so many candidates to choose from - but the worst of the worst in my opinion is using script files for network initialization instead of designing some sane file format as Debian did. Thou shall not excute thy data unless thou be a LISP interpreter. Red Hat guys, please stop that crap, it's the level of design competence we might expect from Microsoft.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

You do know that RH 7 came out in 2000 and was discontinued after RH 9 in 2003 for Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2.

Oh, and wasn't that about the time they forked the kernel, landing Alan in eternal doodoo with Linus?

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

I'm running a Redmond distribution, Windows 7 I think it's called. It's not bad, reasonably stable, the installer works just fine, has a nice polished look to it, and seems to have built-in Wine support because Office runs fine on it. I've heard it's been forked into something called Metro/Win8 which is pretty unpleasant, so I'll be sticking with the current distro for awhile.

I tried that same distribution, I tried really hard to like it, I really did, but it just didn't work out. After a couple of weeks of constant irritations like being nagged about viruses and rebooting in the middle of important work I just gave up. That Windows distribution is trying hard to imitate Linux but just can't seem to get the details right.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

Then there was EGCS. But actually, that ended rather well, with a remerge followed presently by world domination. Actually, also true of libc.

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

[devent]

This is the Linux community. I'm surprised that a more standard-compliant compiler is a "bad thing" now.

I'm no expert, but the site http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html is listening the bugs in the broken gcc and is listening them after the language: C, C++ and Assembler.

You would think that the open source and Linux community would rather have a much stricter compiler then to rely solely on a specific branch of gcc.

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.

Re:forgot RH7

[bluefoxlucid]

To be honest, I'd be much happier if Redhat/Fedora leveraged a more Debian-like system. I mean, with systemd and all; but call apache2 apache2 instead of 'httpd' (isn't nginx httpd?), have /etc/apache2/sites-{available,enabled} and so on; /etc/default instead of /etc/sysconfig and the huge mess in there; and so on. Also apt and deb outstrip RPM and Yum in just about every way, from stability to speed to feature set; yum has all kinds of plug-ins that poorly approximate some of the basic features of apt like autoremove

Re: forgot RH7

[ThePhilips]

I'm surprised that a more standard-compliant compiler is a "bad thing" now.

Not "is [...] now." But "was [...] back then."

Purpose of the compiler is to compile existing programs. NOT future programs.

It is counterproductive to suddenly insist on standard compliance when there was previously no standard compliant compiler available.

Re:forgot RH7

[h4rr4r]

I tried that.
The package manager sucked. The shell was terrible, it came with none of the normal stuff installed. It did not even have a complier. On top of that it lacked cron or anything else a non drooling user would need.

Re:forgot RH7

[Rich0]

Yeah, I'd never tout the windows installer in general. The only reason MS gets away with it is that nobody actually runs it.

If you want Ubuntu you run their installer. If you want Windows you just buy the computer with it pre-installed.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

You are forgetting systemd and pulseaudio...

Not at all. I did mention there are a lot of candidates for the title of biggest Red Hat suckage? But dropping the ball on network configuration arguably overshadows those two, disgusting outrages against sanity though they be.

Re:forgot RH7

[V!NCENT]

Compatibility issues with what? PulseAudio sits on top of ALSA or OSS; it doesn't replace it at all. That means that all the ALSA/OSS apps can still run on ALSA/OSS. PulseAudio is a routing thing.

SystemD works with SysV init scripts, but whoever wants to go that route is not thinking straight.

PulseAudio combined with SystemD allows for multi-seat setups, semi-parallel boot of sequential boot dependancie chains (with sockets) and doesn't lose track of processes after lots of forking.

OK you have to learn the Good Stuff before you dive in, but the power of Linux is not being required to internally stay like old crap, so that it may evolve not to become a giant pile of bitrot like Windows.

As of yet, I have never, ever had a problem with PulseAudio, not even when it was first introduced on Ubuntu. Many problems with PA come from not-so-strict ALSA and OSS drivers. Doing homework on Linux compatibility pays off.

Re:forgot RH7

[CBravo]

The whole OS is missing. It's stable at doing the browser thingy and a well configured office is usable.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

As of yet, I have never, ever had a problem with PulseAudio, not even when it was first introduced on Ubuntu.

Nice anecdote. Right now, pulseaudio is using 2.5% cpu with nothing generating sound.

Re:forgot RH7

[lsatenstein]

I concur that. I switched to Debian after the fiasco of RH7 and never looked back.

You do know that RH 7 came out in 2000 and was discontinued after RH 9 in 2003 for Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2. The latest release of RHEL is version 6 which will be supported for 13 years. Go to the Redhat site, they don't hide anything if you don't believe me.

Personally I don't really like the Debian distributions and prefer the Fedora/Redhat ones since I have never had many problems with Fedora Core 7 and have updated regularly all the way to Fedora 18 which IMHO is actually the best distribution to date although I would say that the new installer is a little bit cosmetically challenged, however it does what it is supposed to do and it does it well. I do think Alan Cox's statement saying that the new installer is unusable is totally wrong, although I do agree it is different.

For me to go from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 I always do a fresh install of the OS which in this case took me about 45 minutes, then it took me an additional 30 minutes to install all software i use and potentially use. Then it took me about an hour to do the updates on over 1700 packages and during that time I actually did other things such as watching a video and surfing the web on the machine I was updating.

===
I concur with you regarding Fedora. I started with Core, and never stopped installing new Fedora versions every six months. I keep 1 previous version on my system as a comparison of how much some programs have changed.

With Unity, and Gnome, I was getting carpal tunnel problems with my wrist and with the muscle controlling my left mousebutton forefinger. Too many click click clicks. Worse, the hot corner was too sensitive, and I got aggravated with windows centralizing, jumping to Maximum, jumping to reduced size,etc. etc.

I installed Cinnamon with Fedora 18, and I am delighted. I have a favourites panel where my frequent programs are always one click to initiate. I have a favourites column where a second click can launch a favourite, and with sliding along (similar layout to kde), I can start any other program. It is a very very practical improvement of Gnome2. Try it, you will like it.
Fedora 18 anaconda was rushed to release, because of design delays due to UEFI, arm, and more. The new design will be a winner.

I have written to the developers to suggest improvements and I posted requests with bugzilla. The applications are rock solid. I have no complaints here.

If you are a Fedora biggot (like me), visit rpmfusion.org, where you can learn about non-free unlicensed code. Under Users in the main page is a link to a Russian Fedora spin. I have standardized on that. The spin is in English, has all the codecs, for audio, video, and many developer facilities (Subversion, etc.). This Fedora Spin is what one does to Fedora when a new release is published.

Re:forgot RH7

[Wolfrider]

--I remember something like that, back ~1999 or 2000; some distro came out that couldn't even recompile it's own kernel. Talk about EPIC fail... And finding a new level of "stupid". IIRC, I switched to SuSE 7.3 for a while over that hot mess.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

It means that systems without pulsaudio, that you know... do mixing in the kernel properly run into issues with software that requires pulse.

Systemd is a re-write of launchd (breaking compatibility with launchd) just because lennart doesn't like the more open license of launchd.

Re:forgot RH7

[Crosshair84]

Yup, I have my old Win7 install still on my 1tb data drive so in case my SSD dies I can still boot into a functioning computer.

Though to be honest, I've been quite disappointed at the performance boost from the SSD. Having a crapload of RAM may be the difference.

Re:forgot RH7

[V!NCENT]

If you think that systemd is just a rewrite because someone didn't like launchd, you are dead wrong.

Systemd does a lot more than simply launching. A simple websearch reveals that it does way more than just that.

For example:
1. Using cgroups to keep track of processes, even after double forking, so that it can launch/kill services on demand, so everything you do requires absolutely the most minimum amount of services. Say if you don't use Bluetooth; it doesn't run. If you do want to use it, then it automatically gets killed, so save useless CPU cycles;
2. Since it keep track, you don't have to assign users to certain groups anymore and logout everytime you want to update the environment;
3. It enables multi-seat setups and when you hook up a new screen, keyboard and mouse into a USB hub, it wilt automatically launch a new user session for you and prompts for a graphical login on the new screen, automatically;
4. And so on and so forth...

Re:forgot RH7

[hawkinspeter]

I tried using it's add/remove programs thingy, but it couldn't find cygwin. In fact, it only seemed able to remove some packages (and not even all of them). I've heard reports that removing a package doesn't even fully remove it - there'll still be information left in some binary datastore called the "registry".

Re:forgot RH7

[sourcerror]

Fedora Core 4 was about 2005.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

launchd does more than launching daemons, too, such as start/stop to conserve resources. i cbf checking all your points, but most definitely points 1 and 3 are covered by launchd. ive never had to deal with point 2 on the mac, so presumably it handles that as well.

Come on, Alan ;(

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't all be the worst!

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[lennier]

They can't all be the worst!

You might very well think that, but then you encounter the non-Euclidean badness that is Unity/Gnome3 and all sanity goes out the window.

A million distributions, all simultaneously worse than each other is entirely possible with the way that Linux desktop development is trending at the moment.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[dririan]

They switched back to GNOME.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[Savage-Rabbit]

They can't all be the worst!

No, they can't, but as far as I am concerned it''s a tossup between Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.x when it comes to deciding which is more crappy. Ubuntu absolutely dies when I fire up VirtualBox and it has a legion of really annoying bugs, some of which have been around since 11.x or earlier; as for Fedora 18 the 64 bit version didn't even boot on my IBM desktop. Still searching for a Linux distro that actually does a modicum of QA...

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[gTsiros]

slackware is nice ... ?

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[tomofumi]

When i saw the big Amazon icon at the Unity taskbar after install 12.10, I know it's time for me to leave Ubuntu...

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[falconwolf]

When i saw the big Amazon icon at the Unity taskbar after install 12.10, I know it's time for me to leave Ubuntu...

If you don't like it you can uninstall it. For more than a month I've been installing Xubuntu 12.04 on PCs I'm building. And as part of that I uninstall, remove, Abiword and Gnumeric then install LibreOffice.

Falcon

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[drkstr1]

slackware is nice ... ?

Fanboy concurs.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[jones_supa]

When i saw the big Amazon icon at the Unity taskbar after install 12.10, I know it's time for me to leave Ubuntu...

That is a too small reason to completely switch a distribution, especially when the instructions to remove the silly Amazon thing can be looked up easily.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[TractorBarry]

>If you don't like it you can uninstall it.

That's like saying if someone shits in your bed you can always wash your bedding. The fact is that they shit in your bed.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[David Gerard]

Last Debian CD I used (Wheezy) had GNOME 3 and LXDE. I tried GNOME 3, laughed when literally the only button I could find was the off switch, and loaded LXDE.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[realityimpaired]

As long as I can get e17 packages for it, I don't care what the default is. That's why my main laptop has been running Bodhi for almost 2 years now.... e17 isn't everybody's cup of tea, but when you want something with all the bling of a modern system, but as light/fast as Awesome, it's very difficult to beat e17. I'm under 400MB of RAM used right now, and have firefox open with multiple tabs and extensions (flash, lastpass, adblock plus, etc.) as well as xchat and gajim. :)

If somebody built a minimalist e17-basted distro that was based on Debian, or preferably Slackware, and didn't come with everything and their dog installed out of the box, I'd seriously consider installing it. Bodhi seems to be the closest, and to be fair it's the first Ubuntu-based distro I've ever installed that lasted more than a day, but I cut my teeth on Slackware and really prefer the way that they do things on that system.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[Yebyen]

Did my comment get eaten? Maybe I got stuck at preview...

Try elivecd.
http://elivecd.org/

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[Yebyen]

Arguments against elive:
It comes with everything and their dog installed -- sorry, as easy as it is to install software in Debian, that does not make it any easier discovering it. Easier to make it clean and cheap to uninstall things. The stable release fit on a 700MB CD. That's not bloated, but the newest development ISOs are now up to DVD size from including LibreOffice and more of everything and their dog. Last I checked, there was no installer in the current development ISOs.

This might be another roadblock for some people.

Arguments for elive:
You asked for Debian. It's based on Debian. You may not have wanted to ask for that, I am guessing you are not running Debian Lenny anymore. It's quite out of date. This is an artifact of the Debian release cycle. Actually still an argument /for/ elive. You can apt-get --purge remove anything you don't want. There is also deborphan if that doesn't work for you.

First thing I would usually do is get rid of that ancient version of Firefox and install Chrome and a 64-bit kernel.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[Yebyen]

PS:

From deborphan, there's orphaner. Just reading the man pages, you might not discover:

$ orphaner -a -n

The easiest way to clean up your packages with loads more precision than apt-get remove, by far.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[Compaqt]

Are instructions required? If it's in the taskbar, why not just drag it off?

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[jones_supa]

Ah, yes. I was slightly incorrectly thinking about the Amazon Shopping Lens.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[dririan]

That's what I hate about Ubuntu (well, one of the things at least), but love about Debian. In Debian, the default DE doesn't really matter. You just don't install the default, and apt-get install what you want later. In Ubuntu, you either install the server version (blech) or install one of the {U,Ku,Xu,Lu}buntus and install your preferred environment later after the default is already installed. Sure you can uninstall it, but why bother going through the process of instaling Unity/KDE/Xfce/LXDE if you're just going to apt-get purge it anyway? I'm an i3 person myself, and there's no i3buntu sadly, so I generally avoid Ubuntu even though I love Steam, and Steam only officially supports Ubuntu.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[higuita]

Yes!

People use Red Hat?

[Blindman]

I guess this is a big deal. I tried Red Hat a long time ago and I have never looked back. I'm just going to stick with Slackware.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first distro I ever bought was a Red Hat 4.something in a retail box. Tried several others, including Mandrake when it appeared ('cause at the time Red Hat didn't have KDE and I wanted to try it.) Settled on Debian for a number of years, then switched to Ubuntu. Using Ubuntu now, but considering a future switch to Mint.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[panthrkub]

"Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open source company in its fiscal year 2012, reaching $1.13 billion in annual revenue." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat Yes, I'd say people use "Red Hat". More specifically they probably use Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or JBoss, etc.

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:People use Red Hat?

[Tough Love]

You're delusional... forgot to take your meds again?

Re:People use Red Hat?

[shutdown -p now]

That's an interesting assertion. Can you link to any supporting documents? I had a look at their financial statement on the website and didn't see it, but then I'm not good at parsing these kinds of documents.

(as a side note, that web page has a .cfm extension - really, RedHat uses ColdFusion? are their web developers masochistic?)

Re:People use Red Hat?

[NekSnappa]

I remember when Mandrake use to show pictures of bulldozers and other heavy equipment while the packages were installed.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[Ash Vince]

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.

I just moved to Mint on my new laptop and I mostly agree with this. I have had a few issues with it but generally speaking it seems brilliant.

I chose Cinnamon as I wanted to maintain some semblance of compatibility with Gnome (ie, gnome shell) but with a proper desktop orientated OS. I bought a laptop with a 1600*900 screen for a reason: I like smaller icons. I do not want everything to be made artificially huge so I can use a thumb instead of a mouse pointer as I did not get a touchscreen laptop.

I used Ubuntu before and didn't hate Unity, especially now it has got pretty stable and usable. I might even jump back to it in a few years time when I can afford a shit hot combined touch screen tablet ultrabook type thing (If you can hear this Mr Shuttleworth, just dig deep in your pocket for some loose change and I'll be back to Ubuntu in a jiffy).

Until then though I figured sticking with a desktop OS made sense and Mint seems to be the best fit for that at the moment.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[RedHat Rocky]

Mint seems fine at first, but have fun at the first "upgrade". Or as it is preferred to be called: wipe-install-from-scratch.

I expected a simple dist-upgrade to work but 12 -> 13 was junk and at 14 the system still thinks it's Mint 12. What?

Yes, release notes prefer to call full wipe/install an "upgrade".

NEXT!

Darkside

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome Alan! We've been waiting for you.

  ONE OF US!! ONE OF US!!

Re:Darkside

[SpaceLifeForm]

You can not trust Canonical any more than Redhat.

He will realize Ubuntu has problems, and he will eventually switch to Debian.

Give him a few weeks.

Re:Darkside

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... right. Because he's totally unaware when it comes to various linux distros and is randomly trying them for the first time until his personal opinion coincides with slashdot trolls.

Re:Darkside

[Sponge Bath]

The OP may be talking about ascension to grumpy old man status. He joins others like Senator McCain and John Stewart in raising his cane to the sky in defiance.

Re:Darkside

[johnw]

He will realize Ubuntu has problems, and he will eventually switch to Debian.

And then his journey to the Dark Side will be complete.

Re:Darkside

[fishthegeek]

It's a damn shame you posted AC. I for one would like to know the person that so brilliantly (possibly accidentally) quoted one of the creepiest movies ever made.

Freaks

Re:Darkside

[Lennie]

There is nothing Dark Side about Debian, it is one of the most enlighted operating systems ever created.

Go Arch

[sphantom]

After making the switch from Ubuntu to Fedora after the Unity fiasco, I recently switched from F17 to Arch due to all the delays. I couldn't be happier.

Re:Go Arch

[pwizard2]

If you want Ubuntu without all the bullshit just use Linux Mint.

Re:Go Arch

[dmbasso]

If you want Ubuntu without all the bullshit just use Debian.

FTFY.

U = D + BS_U
LM = U - BS_U/2 + BS_LM

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit like ... support? That's fine if you are a home hobby user, but not in a corporate env. We need someone to blame.
Redhat provides that.
Ubuntu provides that.

Arch, mint, debian do not - except from 3rd parties. I'm not claiming that 3rd party support is not really better, just that explaining that to management is a loosing effort.

Re:Go Arch

[sphantom]

I'll admit that systemd has a learning curve as some commands don't have equivalents, but after a couple of days of having to google for the right commands, I don't think its as bad as its made out to be (most likely by those who aren't willing to atleast try to use it for an extended period of time).

IMHO, it seems to be a "simple but limited" vs "complex and powerful" argument. I also find switching distros solely because of the init system to be a little much. Do yourself a favor and at least attempt to learn the regularly used systemd commands with an open mind. You may find its not nearly as bad as you think.

Re:Go Arch

[sphantom]

I actually find pacman to be a little better than apt/aptitude. Additionally, dealing with packages not in the standard repos tends to be a better experience in Arch.

On the flip side of the coin though, Arch feels a bit like Gentoo at times in that some tasks can require a bit of manual intervention.

Plusses and minuses to both I suppose.

Re:Go Arch

[armanox]

Where can I find a 10' Model M keyboard?

Re:Go Arch

[sphantom]

To each his own, AC. Obviously you're passionate and hard minded about it, otherwise you wouldn't have referred to me as a zealot after I mentioned I've switched distros 3 times in the past 2 years (and hence package managers and init systems). Thanks for playing though.

Re:Go Arch

[quenda]

I don't know - pure Debian tends to be a bit conservative and lagging. Have they made the switch to ELF yet?

Re:Go Arch

[Nimey]

A bit? I played with Arch for about six months and gave up the second time I ran into an update that broke the system because I didn't read the homepage first.

I'll stick with Ubuntu Server if I want a fully customized barebones install. That sucks too, but not quite so strongly and I won't have to do a reinstall every time the devs want to randomly make incompatible changes.

Re:Go Arch

[rrohbeck]

I guess you haven't tried Debian experimental.

Re:Go Arch

[sconeu]

Try Mageia. It has all the Mandriva goodness and none of the suckitude.

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds so appealing, isn't it a wonder that all the non-geeks in the world aren't interested in switching to Linux? I mean how could they not want to go through a process of installing, testing, uninstalling and re-installing to find an operating system that works when they want to use their computer?

Linux is great for geeks but with the disjoint effort and lack of consistency it's entirely unsurprising that desktop marketshare for Linux is virtually nothing.

Re:Go Arch

[hierofalcon]

There's always rc.local. You can just use the old init.d list for service start order and start everything that is really important yourself in the right order. Shutdown isn't as clean, but if you don't like the way systemd does things you can at least disable most of it and do it by hand. I know that isn't an ideal solution, but at least my services now end up running when I have a login prompt. I couldn't guarantee that with systemd.

Re:Go Arch

[markdavis]

+1

I think Mageia is a great, solid distro now. Best installer of anything I have tried. It doesn't get updated as fast or as much, though... which is either good or bad, depending on your perspective. I have Mageia 2 on my main desktop at home, and wouldn't have it any other way.

I just installed Fedora 18 on Friday on my laptop- what a mess. 17 was *MUCH* better- I hate the new installer in 18. Once it is installed, however, it feels a lot like 17, which is not a bad thing. But even in this less-than-ideal state, I like it better than Ubuntu (by far).

Re:Go Arch

[lattyware]

To be fair, they make it quite clear that you should check that before doing updates - and that it's not a hands-off distro, it's quite clearly stated that Arch is a distro where you will need to get your hands dirty at times - they are proud of that, and it's what the aim is. Also, I don't think I've seen anything that can break your system unless you try and force the upgrade when it fails.

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work we purchase Debian support from HP. We're a huge HP shop, so all HP blades and storage systems (EVA 4400 and 6000). It's nice to have the same contacts for both hardware and software support. I don't understand why HP doesn't market this more.

Re:Go Arch

[lattyware]

Thanks for restating the same argument everyone always gives. Yes, fragmentation causes problems for Linux, at the same time, it's also what makes it awesome for the people that use it. If I didn't have the choice and power that Linux gives me, I wouldn't be using it.

Re:Go Arch

[Nimey]

Yes? Nothing stops them from having pacman emit warnings like "HEY STUPID YOU NEED TO FOLLOW THESE STEPS BECAUSE WE MADE GRATUITOUS INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES" requiring acknowledgement before proceeding. That they don't is just lazy and rude.

I don't remember exactly which changes bit me. One of them was to do with GPG-signing packages, and good old pacman didn't tell me that I had to increase system entropy, so it just hung there until I gave up and rebooted [1], which broke something or other. The other... it was before the systemd change (although that broke a VM copy I had, probably from my temerity at not having run pacman for a few months on that instance)... did they switch to Pulse Audio?

"Hands on" is something like Slackware where you have to configure half the packages for them to work, or Debian 2.x which was even more needy. I can't think of a charitable description for something like this.

[1] I was new to Arch at the time (Debian weenie since '99) so I didn't know what to expect.

Re:Go Arch

[Martin Blank]

I upgraded a couple of days before the actual F18 release once I saw that they had signed off on release code. I went to use preupgrade as I've done (with very mixed success) in the past and found it wasn't showing upgrade possibilities. I saw something about the new fedup method, ran that, and it went more smoothly than any distro upgrade I've ever done. I had to work around one package from a repo that hadn't rolled out F18 code yet and KDE wouldn't start without a separate update (quickly applied from within GNOME), but aside from that, there were no issues. I would have appreciated more information about where the upgrade was at any given time, but since I saw the drive light was still flashing, I let it run, and after an hour or so, I was back in business.

I also know, though, that using Fedora in the weeks after a new version release means taking on enormous risk. I've spent weeks recovering from a bad upgrade and occasionally even an install. I think it was around F13 that I had the worst experience. But in the long run, I prefer Fedora because it has some of the newest code and it has reasonably decent community support. It's a good enough mix that I stay with it for main installations.

Re:Go Arch

[falconwolf]

If you want Ubuntu without all the bullshit just use Linux Mint.

Others may say the same about Linux Mint. I looked at Mint 13, Maya, and liked it but I use Unity now. And I'm getting ready to use Arch Linux.

Falcon

Re:Go Arch

[falconwolf]

IMHO, it seems to be a "simple but limited" vs "complex and powerful" argument.

Arch is a bare minimum distro, it eliminated a lot of stuff most people won't use. Of course those who want things can install them.

Falcon

Re:Go Arch

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Right next to the 10' long Model P ....

Re:Go Arch

[Tough Love]

That sounds so appealing, isn't it a wonder that all the non-geeks in the world aren't interested in switching to Linux? I mean how could they not want to go through a process of installing, testing, uninstalling and re-installing to find an operating system that works when they want to use their computer?

Oh yeah, it's so much more wonderful to not have any choice, and when it doesn't work you're just fucked.

Re:Go Arch

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, I've looked at it. The latest release is a bit old, so I ended up testing out FC17 first. I think I'll put Mageia in a VM though. What do you know about ROSA? It seems to release more often.

Re:Go Arch

[lattyware]

If they emit warnings, that annoys the rest of the users who don't need them. Why does every distro have to suit everyone? No, Arch is not designed to be user friendly, but that's the point - it expects you to know what is going on and deal with it, that way it can be simpler and more efficient for those users who are happy with that. If you don't like that, use a different distro - that's not being lazy or rude, it's just making the operating system that certain people want, not yet another one aimed at the average user. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but it's not what Arch does.

As to your examples, it's entirely possible that the first case could have broken stuff, I guess. I'm no expert, although the second case doesn't make sense as Arch doesn't ship with any audio system by default, so 'switching' doesn't make sense.

Re:Go Arch

[sconeu]

Don't know about ROSA. Yeah, the current release of Mageia is several months old, but Mageia 3 is in beta right now.

Re:Go Arch

[hawkinspeter]

Loosening. The word is loosening.

Re:Go Arch

[TheGratefulNet]

funny; but actually, try to run an a.out image these days. can't. you can on freebsd (last I tried) with a strange version combo of linux emulation. but on linux, a native a.out binary won't even be understood by the system.

and yes, I have a commercial paid app that is very very old but I would still like to be able to run it. I used to keep a freebsd box around just for that app.

"if your app is too old, run it on freebsd." lol

Re:Go Arch

[TheGratefulNet]

I actually find pacman to be a little better than apt/aptitude

I have a wrapper that I use, instead:

# donkeykong-get update

(etc)

Re:Go Arch

[serviscope_minor]

I also find switching distros solely because of the init system to be a little much. Do yourself a favor and at least attempt to learn the regularly used systemd commands with an open mind. You may find its not nearly as bad as you think.

I'm on the fence about systemd, having been forced to switch.

It's a massive change. It's not much of an improvement in terms of boot speed compared to init, for well written boot scripts (arch boots about as fast either way, and it's only a few seconds either way anyway).

systemd is much less transparent which is a problem. It seems to have huge layers of complexity.

That said, the new system with polkit and dbus is necessarily more complex because it allows finer grained, more complex interactions.

Even so, I still don't get systemd apart from parallel boots which is only a minute improvement compared to well written sysv init scripts.

Re:Go Arch

[Nimey]

Or create a virtual machine with a contemporary Linux distro, perhaps the one the program was specifically supported on. If your app doesn't need to get on the Internet there's no need to expose the old distro, so security shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Go Arch

[Nimey]

If your old app has a GUI, a current VM manager might not have a supported video driver for your distro's old version of Xfree86. However, you could have it use the VESA BIOS extension (VBE) driver and that'll work - it works for me with Debian 2.2, for instance.

Re:Go Arch

[viperidaenz]

Why? your arms wouldn't be long enough reach all the keys.

Re:Go Arch

[tenco]

Installed Arch just a few days ago on an old asus netbook. First Linux distro here that came with two-finger-scrolling for X.org right out of the box.

Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf, Linux veterans are now using Ubuntu? Go get Arch.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

These people have lives.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Trilkin]

If you weren't anon, I'd mod this comment up so hard you'd get an orgasm that could be felt from across the world.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the headline would make about as much sense as

Ralph Nader: Chevy Corvair "The Worst Car Ever," Switches To Ford Pinto

Was this sourced from The Onion?

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:Ubuntu, really?

[cheesybagel]

I used to compile my own kernel on Slackware back when the ELF binary format came out. I have since figured out I am more productive compiling the application source code I am writing instead.

Still it is cool to have choice. FWIW I use Ubuntu. Unity has got less bad with the upgrades but the Compiz crashes and lockups sometimes make me want to hit the wall.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Billlagr]

Ah memories..I used to have to compile my own kernel, on Slack, to get the driver for my parallel port Zip100 drive to work. When I had a smokin' P90 and 1Gb drive.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[nappingcracker]

I was fine with Unity and Gnome 3, liked them both. But I'm in the same boat as you -- compiz would crash and disrupt my workflow. Switched to KDE and I now have a different set of gripes and crashes, but not at the WM level. Better, but...sigh...when will it all work and have a nice integrated desktop?

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[shutdown -p now]

So go get Mint. It'll save more time, since you won't have to remove Gnome Shell and install Cinnamon (or MATE).

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[falconwolf]

I was fine with Unity and Gnome 3, liked them both. But I'm in the same boat as you -- compiz would crash and disrupt my workflow. Switched to KDE and I now have a different set of gripes and crashes, but not at the WM level. Better, but...sigh...when will it all work and have a nice integrated desktop?

Get a Mac if you want it to work. And if you want, some of the same software that runs in Linux can run in OS X too. It does come with X11. Fink installs .deb, Macports, .rpm, and Homebrew installs other packages. Apple also supports open source developers.

Falcon

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Eunuchswear]

I was fine with Unity and Gnome 3, liked them both. But I'm in the same boat as you -- compiz would crash and disrupt my workflow. Switched to KDE and I now have a different set of gripes and crashes, but not at the WM level. Better, but...sigh...when will it all work and have a nice integrated desktop?

What is this "compiz" of which you speak? Gnome3 doesn't use compiz.

Why do people use badly hacked versions of Debian instead of just using Debian?

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[metrix007]

What a silly suggestion. It's only certain kinds of people who think it is a good idea to pay *more* for a restricted platform.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[x_t0ken_407]

What's 1337 about Arch Linux -- even perception-wise? You can't use Arch just for the fact that it doesn't install 100's of useless things that you'll never use? Hell even Arch is "easy", if that's what you're looking for. One would think you were referring to a *BSD or something...

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[atomican]

It's a trade-off. You trade less freedom for a substantially more polished desktop experience. If you want full openness you have to sacrifice a bit of your sanity and time to deal with the problems of unsupported desktop DEs and lack of financial motivation to fix their issues.

Most people I know who initially value openness value their time more as they get older, hence the Linux geeks move to OS X or back to Windows and deal with the compromise. It's a complete failure as a desktop OS compared to commercial vendors.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[falconwolf]

What a silly suggestion. It's only certain kinds of people who think it is a good idea to pay *more* for a restricted platform.

1996 want's it's mime back. Macs cost no more than Windows OEM PCs do. The thing is is you have to start with a Mac then configure the Windows PC to the Mac's specs. And don't have more memory installed than what it comes with, as you will be paying more. One employee in an Apple store specifically told me to buy a Mac with the standard amount of RAM then buy more myself and install it. He said that will save me half of what the RAM cost. Before I bought my Mac I made a list of the requirements I would need to do what I wanted. I then picked a MacBook Pro that met them. Afterwards I went to various OEMs to configure their laptops to meet the Mac's and compared prices. the cheapest price was $50 less than the Mac. The Alienware, Dell, and HP laptops were more than $200 more.

And as far as a restricted platform is concerned, Apple uses the same parts as Windows OEMs. Apple does not restrict what is installed on Macs, unlike iPads, iPhones, and iPods. As I said I dual-boot my Mac with Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 12.04. And Apple does not restrict developers/programmers from [programming for Macs. Though I no longer am I used to be a member of Apple Developer Connection.

Of course if you want a Linux PC you may be able to build one for less than a prebuilt PC.

Falcon

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[metrix007]

Err, no, or mind showing your work? The thing is, Windows PC's vary wildly in price due to the diversity in models (ahhh, freedom to choose). To get a PC/Laptop with similar specifications than any given mac, is generally significantly cheaper. Just have a look now on Newegg at laptops with simialr spec to Macbooks, the Macs are almost twice as much.

And you're right, it isn't that restricted, aside from not being able to even change your own battery. The bigger problems are their complete disregarded for backwards and forward compatibility and the small selection of software, and no, linux software doesn't count.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[metrix007]

Polished desktop experience is subjective. Personally I think it's the worse out of the OSS choices and Windows 7.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[falconwolf]

Err, no, or mind showing your work?

Here's my recent comparison, it's almost a year old and therefore is not valid anymore. And in that post I even state buyers shouldn't upgrade the RAM because Apple charges more for them than third parties do, just as I said in the post you replied to does. Currently comparing Mac Pros doesn't work as the Pros use 2 year old Xeon CPUs, but it will soon hopefully. Tim Cook better keep his word that Mac Pros will be upgraded to the most recent Xeons and include Thunderbolt. However comparisons are possible with laptops, I won't try the all-in-one iMac nor the Mac Mini.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display

• 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
• 15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology with 2880-by-1800 native resolution scaled to 1920x1200
• 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L
• 512GB Flash Storage

$3,049.00

Dell Precision M4700 Mobile Workstation

• 3rd Gen Intel® Core i7-3740QM Processor (2.7GHz, 6M cache, Upgradable to Intel® vPro technology)
• 15.6" UltraSharp FHD (1920x1080)
• 8.0GB, DDR3-1600MHz
• 750GB 2.5" 7200rpm Hard Drive

$2,498.53, with $700 off making it $1,699.00.

Not quite comparable. A second Dell Precision M4700 Mobile Workstation

• 3rd Gen Intel® Core i7-3840QM Processor (2.8GHz, 8M cache, Upgradable to Intel® vPro technology)
• 15.6" UltraSharp FHD (1920x1080)
• 16.0GB, DDR3-1600MHz
• 512GB 2.5" (SATA3) Mobility Solid State Drive
• Resource DVD - Contains Drivers
• Recovery Media for Windows® 7 Professional,64bit,Multiple Language

$4,187.59 with instant savings of $1,340.03 making it $2,847.56

I tried to configure both of these to be closer to the MacBook Pro, but only the second offered hardware configuration that I saw.

And you're right, it isn't that restricted, aside from not being able to even change your own battery.

I've posted elsewhere that I hated it that the battery is soldered in and is not user swappable. When I bought my MacBook Pro, I got a second battery with it so when the first one drained down during use when I wasn't near an outlet I could swap them, though it's too big for most people I did want a big display and be able to go hours and hours without needing to be plugged in, ie I wanted to take it hiking. Weight? I used to hike carrying 50+ lbs and have hiked carrying 120 lbs. If I can't carry just 10 lbs then I'm in real bad shape.

The bigger problems are their complete disregarded for backwards and forward compatibility and the small selection of software, and no, linux software doesn't count.

Backwards and forwards compatibility? What does that mean? What does small selection of software mean too? And why doesn't Linux software count? Because if it is counted Macs run more software than both Linux and MS Windows? That is an arbitrary limit for no good reason.

However native OS X apps the iTunes app store alone has thousands of downloadable programs. Now I've haven't used iTunes yet, I may use it to download classes from iTunes U which has lectures from a number of universities including MIT. However I prefer to buy my software on media I can keep, CDs or DVDs. Of course a person can download then burn programs on disks, such as from , Source Forge, and

Recent Linux updates...

[Darkness404]

Recent Linux distros have made me miss the days of Ubuntu 7.10 and the like, back when hardware compatibility finally caught up to Windows (wireless cards actually worked out of the box! No more messing with windows drivers in hopes you could get them to sort of work with the kernel!) and they hadn't completely broken the UI (like Gnome 3.x).

It seems like whenever I wipe and re-upgrade a distro I end up having to take weeks to make it work the way I want it to. Although, I have to say I like it better than Windows 8...

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[pwizard2]

IIRC, Broadcom wireless support was still a bit dodgy on Ubuntu back in the 7.10 days. There was no easy-fix install from the repos, you had to manually rip the firmware from the Windows drivers yourself with bcm43xx-fwcutter and hope it would work after the next reboot.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[Darkness404]

Yeah, although I was lucky and never had any Broadcom chips. I forget which brand it was that I had, but it constantly gave me trouble until 7.04 or 7.10 when it started working out of the box.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[PRMan]

I hope Windows doesn't end up that way with everyone always looking back wistfully on Windows 7, but I get this feeling it's gonna end up that way...

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[sjames]

Given all the talk about up/downgrading Windows 8 ->7, I'd say we're there.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[Darkness404]

Its already happened. Indeed I have a feeling that XP is going to be the platform that people will get nostalgic about 10-15 years later.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[Darkness404]

Yeah, I switched to Linux full time (except on my work laptop which runs Windows 7) when Vista was released simply because Vista was awful. In fact I convinced quite a few others to try Linux because of the problems with Vista, anymore though I'd just tell them to stick with Windows because of all the annoying quirks a modern distribution of Linux has. For example a recent Ubuntu install I had to do everything from enabling basic shortcuts (such as ctrl+alt+backspace) to just silly tweaks like editing configuration files to switch the buttons from the left hand side to the right hand side (before giving up with Unity/Gnome 3.x and installing cinnamon), not to mention loads of other stuff...

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[donaldm]

It seems like whenever I wipe and re-upgrade a distro I end up having to take weeks to make it work the way I want it to. Although, I have to say I like it better than Windows 8...

It took me about 3 hours to do a fresh install of Fedora 18 over my original Fedora 17 before I was fully operational again however i do set-up my file-systems such that I only need to reformat the operating system parts not my data. I do actually backup all my data on a regular basis however because I am careful with my file-system layout there is never a need for me to do a recovery. Of course I do my homework prior to doing an upgrade which is no different to what I do when planning any upgrade to any machine be it a Linux or Unix OS.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[cheesybagel]

Nah Windows 7 is fine.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[dbIII]

Wireless support on anything was dodgy for a while - there was at least one brand that kept changing chipsets without changing the model number or the packaging. If you lost the install media it was a case of trial and error downloading several windows drivers for that model number until you found one that works. Then there were others that were just very buggy.
Now it's 3G wireless modems that are in dodgy poorly supported and unstable territory. After a few hardware and firmware hassles are sorted out there are likely to be solid drivers for a lot of platforms.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[Ambassador Kosh]

Takes me about an hour to upgrade between ubuntu versions also and I have never lost anything.

Well technically it takes the computer an hour, I let it start running and go do something else since it does a very good job without me watching it.

Overall upgrades work pretty well on most systems now, people just have a fetish about clean installing all the time.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[BlackPignouf]

I treat present Ubuntu as a bad fork of old Ubuntu.
Linux Mint is the master branch of good old Ubuntu.

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[Reapy]

I've been having to use a power Mac at work and while it is a nice laptop, Mac in my personal life seems like a pretty shitty idea, not only do you get the lack of gaming support of Linux, you also buy in to a gimme gimme gimme culture where even the most basic apps cost 20 dollars. Whereas windows and Linux have a plethora of open source / free software to choose from.

I almost was going to find the Mac as something great to develop in as it is a nice marriage of GUI and command shell, but strangely all the tools and software I would want to use for productivity costs and costs, pretty much wrecking any gains you would get from Darwin.

Also, how about a fucking delete key, just saying...

Re:Recent Linux updates...

[atomican]

The problem I have is that, for all its flaws I still like Linux. I like the philosophy, the control, the freedom and the lack of in-your-face commercialism and corporatism that one gets in a lot of commercial software. So I try to ensure that whatever I do, I use as much cross-platform software and file formats such that if it does advance to a state where I'm satisfied I could use Linux as a primary system, the transition will be relatively painless. Until that happens, I'll keep following it with interest but not lose any sleep over having to deal with its shit.

Also someone modded my post troll before. Good old Slashdot - if you have an opposing opinion and even suggest Linux might not be the shining diamond that a lot of people make it out to be, you MUST be trollin'.

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:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[ufpdom]

agreed.. its super bleeding edge.. u get new stuff but at a cost. Granted i Havent use FC in awhile.

+1 to your comment

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[blind biker]

people whose OS installs get screwed up tend to be louder than those for whom things just work.

Apparently not.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines

Do you use kickstarts to automate deployment?
On top of that, do you
* password-protect GRUB?
* lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation?
* expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install?
* require that updated packages be installed during automated installation?

As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer. If you know workarounds, please reply! We could use your help and I'd send you a nice gift in return. :-)
—DMW

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[hobarrera]

Arch is bleeding edge, and way more than Fedora. I've never seen broken installers or any important packages broken. Most issues in general, are upstream packages, but nothing as important as the installer.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[bill_mcgonigle]

People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch

General rules of thumb (assuming a normal 6-month cycle):

A Fedora release is broken for the first 30 days. Things are rapidly fixed. Yeah, that should be beta, but too few people test. Personally, I can't have my daily work machines broken for beta, but I do install it when I'm on the previous release and developers are working on something that needs fixing that I need fixed, or when I have a spare machine I don't have to rely on.
Months 2-5 are where most of the annoying bugs get fixed. I usually upgrade my daily use machines around month 3.
Months 6-12 are where most people can use the system. I upgrade my wife's machine around month 6. She likes the snazzy new features in Digikam or whatever.
Month 12 is when you start to realize you need stuff that's going in the next version only.
Month 14 is when you realize that you forgot to upgrade to the next release when it was at month 6.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[donaldm]

We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines; there have been zero issues.

I have two machines and everything I use including wireless works perfectly and I do use allot of things.

The installer was a "WTF? Oh, got it." inconvenience the first time around.

My sentiments exactly. Personally the new installer is IMO cosmetically challenged but it does work and it works well.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[quantaman]

Before is was a some guy on the Internet complaining about the installer, now it's a big name in the Linux community (and a former employee of Red Hat) saying the whole release has big problems.

It could be that he was unlucky enough to have a bad experience but he's enough of a name that his rant is minor news.

Personally on the two machines I've tried on one the upgrade went well but evolution ignored all my old configuration (and the configuration backup I made) and I only avoided reconfiguring it from scratch by upgrading from an older version of a config backup, on the other machine the upgrade kernel simply didn't boot so I'm still on F17 until the bug is sorted out (or I upgrade via yum).

A 3rd machine (old laptop) seems fine but I've barely used it.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[uvajed_ekil]

F18 is a bleeding-edge testing distribution.

I wouldn't really call Fedora "bleeding edge," as in being futuristic currently. Perhaps a "bloody mess" is a better description. I find it interesting that you warn about expecting "glitches" and downplay the installer, while the Fedora teams officially promotes it as stable and reliable and makes a big deal about what a step forward their crappy installer is. I'll do the same with this as I have for the last 10+ Fedora releases - get rid of it and forget about it.

Shame on me for banging my head against the poorly-placed wall that is Fedora every time they put up a new one, I guess.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[xaoslaad]

I think the grub2 password protect thing is fixable - need to add --unrestricted to allow anyone to boot the entry, so it doesn't ask for a password every time. There is a bug for it with the details. Granted it should just work, but it's being tracked and should see the light of day someday... I gather from the trail of comments it is not as trivial as would be liked to fix.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=840204 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=853430

On the updated packages, use cobbler (or whatever) to create a kickstart that adds the updates repo - during the install the latest version should get installed, unless there is some reason that now doesn't work now, but I can't imagine why.

I do use kickstarts to do automated installs and they do work. Without more detail I can't help you more, except to say that I know some of the kickstart options, especially around disk configuration, have changed.

Why doesn't GDM run? Do you just need to run a post install script to ln -sf to set /etc/systemd/system/default.target -> /lib/systemd/system/runlevel5.target? Would need more details to even say why it won't work..."

I'm not the guy you responded to, but can I get a nice gift?

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[AdamWill]

"As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer."

No they are not. You may be having problems with them, in which case sorry, but it is not correct to say they are completely broken, as they are not.

We tested kickstart installs extensively during F18 validation and they work fine. Just fine. In fact they're the part of install that has changed least since F17. It is impossible to help you with whatever problem you're seeing without any details at all, but it is definitely not the case that kickstarts are 'completely broken'.

On "password-protect GRUB" - see the other guy's response. It is not 'completely broken'. The default behaviour of password protection changed upstream between grub1 and grub2; we are following upstream behaviour. 'Restoring' the grub1 behaviour is, as the other guy said, not as straightforward as it might seem.

"lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation"

This seems like an odd thing to talk about. Are you saying you want to do that but you can't? Or what? Details.

"expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install"

Works fine in testing.

"require that updated packages be installed during automated installation"

Kickstart install uses the repos you define. Define repos that include updates and updates will be installed. Don't, and they won't. It's entirely up to you. This has not changed at all between F17 and F18.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[AdamWill]

"but evolution ignored all my old configuration (and the configuration backup I made)"

evo moved a bunch of stuff from gconf to gsettings between 3.4 and 3.6. Nothing specific to f18, you'll see issues with this particular version upgrade in any distro when it happens. Seems like you hit a weirdly bad case, though, usually it just loses a few settings that they forgot to carry over.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[quantaman]

"but evolution ignored all my old configuration (and the configuration backup I made)"

evo moved a bunch of stuff from gconf to gsettings between 3.4 and 3.6. Nothing specific to f18, you'll see issues with this particular version upgrade in any distro when it happens. Seems like you hit a weirdly bad case, though, usually it just loses a few settings that they forgot to carry over.

In more detail what happened is after the upgrade evolution acted like it was a completely new installation, I went to an old laptop where I'd copied over my settings in the past and created a backup there, (also used the same commands to make a dump of a backup of my main config), the import from the laptop dump worked, from the main dump silent failure, I'll probably work up a bug report once I have some more time.

I have no doubt it was just some weird edge case, there just seems to be some weak evidence that more people are hitting weird edge cases for this release (if I wasn't lazy I'd try to justify that by taking stats on bugzilla queries).

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[dbIII]

* password-protect GRUB?

Why bother? They can only get to GRUB if they have physical access and if they have that much access they can unplug the entire machine and pull it apart if they wish.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[dbIII]

Makes sense - gconf is dead and the mailing list has just been people calling for help into an empty void for about the last three years.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[peppepz]

I wonder if he even bothered to report a bug. Probably not.

Are you really applying the standard FOSS conversation-killer "shut up and report a bug" against Alan Cox, who wrote half of the Linux kernel(*) and worked at RedHat himself for ten years?

(*) hyperbole

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[dbIII]

If you are using something connected to a KVM you are probably the person that would be choosing the password.

And I doubt the common guy wiling to change the bool of a box will be motivated/unsupervised enough to get to bypassing that.

If you don't have cameras in every cube (not that I want them) you've have a lot of people unsupervised enough to get a box open and the disk out if that's what it takes and you've locked the BIOS as well (stupid as well and destined to bite you on the arse in the future IMHO), but normally a boot CD or USB stick will do the job.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[petermgreen]

Access to the local keyboard monitor and mouse is not the same as access to the inside of the computer. Many computers have lockable cases and even if they don't physically opening the computer is far more likely to arouse suspicion than merely doing something at the keyboard.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[bluefoxlucid]

Seriously I just update on release day

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[xaoslaad]

No need, was really just happy to help a Fedora user.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[metrix007]

Why lock out /dev/tty2? and not say /dev/tty3/4/5 ?

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[ebvwfbw]

You know about F18? I would have really appreciated it if I could have done an upgrade. The new installer didn't seem to allow that. I haven't tried to install this on a server, however F17 was unexpected in that it wouldn't allow me to use the old LCD screen resolution. I think it was 1280X900 or something is what I needed and it wouldn't rotate to new resolutions. I managed to get it installed, however that machine still won't use a gui with that old screen. It's a FW so I don't want to buy a new monitor just for that. Love it if you could provide some insight.

I think they're all wet. I've been using it for about a week. Different installation. Guts are different then RHEL, however they've been different for a few F releases now. I like F18.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[dbIII]

Not if nobody is around to see it. IMHO it's best to assume that whoever has physical access to a machine can get to anything on that machine, and if you don't like that idea you only allow them remote access of some kind (eg. sensitive data is not on the local drive). Combine that with boot loader passwords being a pain to people that are authorised but don't know it (eg. the person that comes in when the one with the passwords has quit, is on holidays or hit by a bus), and you get something that supplies a false sense of security while being a mode of failure (especially since grub goes through periods of being a bit flaky and documentation is STILL inadequate).

Fedora switches to Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wait, what? Fedora switched to Ubuntu?! That's a pretty radical departure for them, isn't it?

Re:Fedora switches to Ubuntu

[madprof]

Desperate times mean desperate measures!

Must be really bad

[Punto]

If he's switching to the distro where the UI looks like they tried to copy OSX (and failed), audio is broken, and all your searches are sent to Amanzon (?), then RH must be *really* bad.

Re:Must be really bad

[UltraZelda64]

Yeah. I just wonder what they'll be doing with the next RHEL since last I heard it was supposed to be based on Fedora 18. From the sounds of things, they'd better either keep parts from Fedora 17 or get scrambling to fix the clusterfuck they've created in Fedora 18, test the hell out of it, and then put that in RHEL instead...

Re:Must be really bad

[AdamWill]

So what you're saying is that RHEL should contain things that originate in Fedora but are improved and bugfixed before inclusion in RHEL? Well, that sounds radical, but it might just work...

Re:Must be really bad

[carnivore302]

that they failed to copy OSX is actually a good thing

Re:Must be really bad

[DeVilla]

It is possible to fail to copy OSx and still be worse than it.

People use Google+?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this is the bigger news?

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.

Re:Duuuh.

[vux984]

consider Fedora to be (at best) beta-test RHEL. I

That's what Red Hat considers it to be as well from what I've read, except that its not a bad thing, because they were pretty upfront about it when they spun Fedora up in the first place.

Re:Duuuh.

[donaldm]

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

That is a bit a of a blanket statement which would not really apply to most Fedora users since developers would have been testing the Alpha and Release Candidates so the final release would be the same one you are going to get for the lifetime of the particular distribution discounting updates of course. I actually did an update on both my machines on the day and I have not had any issues. In fact I would go as far as to say that the final release of Fedora 18 is the best to date although the installer may cause a few people to think WTF however after a cup of coffee (or whatever poison you drink) it does make sense and actually works well.

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

When I purchased my machines the first thing I did was to blow away the Microsoft offerings and i have not looked back.

Re:Duuuh.

[drinkypoo]

It's not a bad thing, but it is inexplicable that anyone would ever depend on Fedora in a production environment. Many do, however, perhaps for the same reason they used Windows 3.1 on the desktop; it's most compatible with their server architecture. We all pretend that one Linux is like another, but it is by far easiest to operate with homogeneous distributions, or as closely matched as possible, and that means Fedora with RHEL unless you wanna pay for all those seats.

Re:Duuuh.

[vux984]

I'd think that would be where CentOS fits... Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the Red Hat, the support, and the cost.

Fedora is what you would run as an enthusiast and to see what's coming down the pipe...

Re:Duuuh.

[x_t0ken_407]

Not really "by far." I have 0 issues running my Arch Desktop in a complete RHEL 5/6 environment -- as far as the production side is concerned. Hell, even for the internal Windows network (that I unfortunately also administer; also includes RHEL staging/testing machines), Arch works beautifully with it. Wine runs most of the trash I need it to, and otherwise I spin up my W7 VM once in a blue moon. I can concede that it's perhaps "easier" to run Fedora in an RHEL environment, but why would you want to deal with fluff and/or reinstalls [at least] every 18 months -- or at all -- when you don't have to?

A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown)

[Chas]

From his G+ page:

(and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

Re:A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown)

[VortexCortex]

From his G+ page:

(and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

Ah, I get it. It's like how sleeping with just one member of the same sex doesn't 'switch you to gay'. You see, just like with sexuality there can be degrees of distro use, it doesn't have to be so black and white -- you don't have to be just a Fedora or Ubuntu user, you could be Bi-distro. Ah, but it doesn't even end there: You could even enjoy OS hybrids like that Arch/BSD chick with a dick, or you can even use Wubi to run GNU/Linux inside Windows, if you're more the man with a clam type.

As a kernel developer, he's beyond mere experimenting; Alan Cox is a connoisseur of all flavors...
With a name like that, would you expect any less?

Re:A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown)

[Pi Is A Rational]

lol'd.

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.

Correction from Alan Cox

[Nimey]

(and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

Color me shocked, shocked that a Slashdot story is sensationalized.

I hope redhat is paying attention to this

[erroneus]

RedHat drives and influences much of what goes on out there. Among these, it influences GNOME and the audio and all the stuff people are complaining about the most. It's almost as if they are intentionally damaging themselves for some reason.

Fedora is supposed ot be like a test for RHEL. Fedora is NOT a "bleeding edge" distro. If you want that, run "Rawhide." Fedora is supposed to be usable and is essentially a usability study for things that would end up in the next RHEL.

Now, with all the negative feedback on GNOME and all that, I would have to wonder what they are doing if the most despised things about Fedora go into RHEL7. They are pushing these things way too hard and I'm guessing they are hoping for user acceptance and it's just not happening.

I ended up giving up on Fedora and went to CentOS but it has problems not being modern enough... or rather, the problems of the way GNOME is built have revealed themselves where you wouldn't see them if you just kept updating with Fedora. Well anyway, CentOS gives me some of what I wanted, but not all or even enough.

Re:I hope redhat is paying attention to this

[Tough Love]

RedHat drives and influences much of what goes on out there...

Ah, your list wasn't long enough. More like: drives, influences, bullies, cajoles, ignores, undermines and works at cross purposes with...

In the end, Red Hat cares about its support contract revenue and view the community as merely a tool to keep that flowing, to be used and occasionally abused in whatever way the illustrious leaders of Red Hat see fit.

Out of the frying pan then, Alan

[drankr]

And into the fire.

Worst Debian Distro

[seyyah]

So he's switched from the "Worst Red Hat Distro" to the worst Debian distro. Got it.

Re:Worst Debian Distro

[uvajed_ekil]

Haha, nice. He could have at least gone to Mint if he wanted Ubuntu compatibility. It's still hard to beat good ol' Debian though. (Mint Debian Edition on this machine)

Re:Worst Debian Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Popularity is no indicator of quality or correctness.

Re:Worst Debian Distro

[drinkypoo]

I thought I would like Debian more than Ubuntu, but I was wrong. The documentation is even more horribly outdated and the community is even snarkier. So I went back to Ubuntu, because I could find answers to my problems. Amusingly, the same answers often don't work on Debian. Sure, I could solve the problems myself, but I would rather do other things. Fun things.

Re:Whatever

[UltraZelda64]

I tend to use the package repository most of the time, not install packages directly, so I don't know what your point is. Even with openSUSE I have managed to install certain packages with minimal to no trouble (Opera, Chrome). I think the real problem is the repositories themselves, not the package format.

That said... I do prefer Debian's and even Ubuntu's system, but that is more due to the fact that both of their repositories have nearly everything I can think of. And also the fact that I know the Debian command line tools better, and like the Synaptic GUI.

Giving up so quickly?

[panthrkub]

At least when Linus Torvalds bitches about Fedora, he actually contributes rather than pulling a: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3sp7o8/

Re:Giving up so quickly?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Dear Alan: Thank you for your comments. You are free to download the source, make any fixes you deem appropriate, and send us back the patches.

What, isn't that the Linux Way?

Re:Giving up so quickly?

[panthrkub]

Touché. :) However, in this case the key word is contributed. I think all of us geeks (I'm going out on a limb and assuming you're a geek as well) can agree that it's pretty silly to give up on something because the installer... the open source installer... is buggy.

I also really, really wanted to use that meme.

He what?

[Lumpy]

IS the man insane?

Just go to Debian and all will be right with his world....

I completely agree...

[RedHackTea]

In the past, I have been a huge Fedora fanboy. Having had been on Fedora 15 for so long, I finally made the jump to Fedora 18 yesterday! I had no problems with the installer (setting up my custom partition scheme was definitely weird; for example, you have to type "/" to get a drop down of possible mount points, and /opt and /var are seemingly excluded from this drop down for no reason).

But oh my god, this release is a complete piece of SHIT. I'm not going to uninstall it because of how much hassle I went through (and this is my work PC), but damn, just damn. Having said this, they did fix some problems in F15, and it looks nicer, but the number of new problems outweighs the benefits. If you're thinking about upgrading, don't do it.

Some of the problems I had to deal with:

• Software Installer: It's now called "Software" instead of "Add/Remove Packages" or whatever. I kept typing in "Add" trying to find it. This thing is the worst piece of shit in the whole installation. They decided to completely remove the X button, remove the ability to resize/reposition, and it's auto-fullscreen on the primary monitor. If you search "libreoffice" on 2 monitors, it expands to take up 1 and 1/3 of your monitors with no way for you to resize it. When I first installed Fedora, I selected a whole bunch of packages I wanted to install and clicked apply; didn't work or do a damn thing. I had to close it and go back in and just select and install a few at a time. What baffles the mind is that this worked on F15. Whoever broke this needs to GTFO.
• System Tray: You know that nice thing in the bottom right of your screen that you think even the dumbest fool couldn't break? They broke it. You have to sit your cursor on the bottom right for about a minute just for it to come up. Rhythmbox/tomboy/clipit/autokey system tray is useless now. And yeah, you know when something crashes and you'll get the "Automatic Bug Report" icon in the system tray? There's no way to f/cking close it.
• Tracker: This was a problem in F15 as well. Remove this POS! It churns up tons of CPU and eats all of my memory trying to cache my whole system. Fix this or delete it. And, BTW, you can't remove this because everything depends on it. You have to do "gnome-session-properties" and make sure that it doesn't autostart. Because I didn't feel like re-logging in, I then had to kill it through System Monitor. This is garbage.
• Non-Obvious Application Menu: Yeah, I was in Nautilus file manager for a while trying to figure out how to get to preferences. Instead of a menu now, you have to right click on the app image in the top-left corner (next to Activities and before the Time/Date). This is more of user error, but it'd be nice to let a guy know.
• Tooltip Background Color: If you use Eclipse at all, you'll notice that your background color is black when hovering over an item and seeing the Javadoc (text is black/dark purple, so unreadable). Yeah, I thought it was Eclipse's fault...nope. I had to go to /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and change the tooltip_bg/fg_color to #f5f5b5/#000000. Let me change this in a convenient way next time...
• Non-System Partitions: This isn't a big deal, but annoying. So I set up a few partitions just for general use during installation. I (in the wheel group) couldn't access them unless root. I had to change the umask in /etc/fstab for these.

That's all I can think of for now. Some of these problems are GNOME 3.6's. WTFITQA (Where the f/ck is the QA?)

Re:I completely agree...

[RedHackTea]

Another one I remembered:

No Updater GUI: Not a big deal, since I always update with "sudo yum update." However, if you like the GUI, you now have to go to "Details" (it's in the Applications; you can also get to it from System Settings at the bottom). This is not intuitive at all. Of course, if there are updates, a popup will appear, but wonder if you close it and forget... I think they should have left the Updater GUI program -- unless they're only targeting super users now.

Re:I completely agree...

[RedHackTea]

For anyone curious, I fixed the system tray issue using this answer. (It's for Ubuntu, but works for Fedora.)

I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[rjr162]

It wouldn't install. Right after where you choose to install the bootloader, it would just crash. The debug info didn't tell why at all. That happened with both the Beta and final releases. Linux Mint and lubuntu installed just fine (as did centos 6.3).

I finally figured out what was causing it.. the optimus or whatever on my Dell laptop, where it uses the integrated Intel video for low demand stuff and an Nvidia chip for higher demand periods. I only figured this out after trying to get the nvidia binary driver installed and saw mention on some guides.about didisabling it if you have issues (and I could see both devices loaded). After disabling in the bios fedora installed fine (but that Damon gnome desktop... grr! )

Anyhow, a little more info on why the installer crashed would have been great considering two debian based systems and centos installed fine with optimus enabled

Re:I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[wvmarle]

I'm impressed that you're putting so much effort in installing something you don't actually like.

Re:I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

He likes bitching at things, much like you apparently.

Re:I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[wvmarle]

Hey, why else are we all visiting /. and bothering to comment?!

Re:I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[rjr162]

Well.. issue is the systems at work are all RHEL, CentOS or FC... I haven't used FC for ages so I figured I'd give it a try. Wasn't thinking FC 18 would use gnome 3.. just a brain fart (since we use it in a server role with a different WM for xrdp).

In the end I just went with centos since I have to setup an ipsec/l2tp vpn on a centos machine

Re:I tried FC18.. well TRIED to try...

[donaldm]

When people talk about Fedora Core they are normally talking about FC 1 through 6. From Release 7 on the name is Fedora not "Fedora Core" see here .

in other news

[smash]

... Alan has given up his job and Linux hacking for the time being for "family reasons" according to his profile on G+

Re:in other news

[SpaceLifeForm]

It is good he saw the darkside. I need a job too.

Who cares

[TheDarkener]

What just one person thinks? Think for yourself. Jeebus.

Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoronix

[atomican]

Yes I know, Phoronix is a pretty scummy website at times with Michael taking credit for basically every new thing that happens to Linux, but there are some interesting posts on its forum when its users are not constantly fighting with each other.

AdamW (Adam Williamson, "the Fedora QA Community Monkey" according to the project wiki) posted this in response to this very topic:

It does always amaze me how people are happy to download an entire *computer operating system* and throw it at their computer - with valuable data on it! - without even reading the damn documentation.

For Pete's sake people, it's an operating system, not a new version of Angry Birds. You might want to read something about it before hitting the big red button. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. There's a guy on the Google+ thread who says "Not knowing that The World Had Changed, I downloded the DVD of F18 and tried up upgrade my machine" - where do these people come from? And what rock have they been living under while three thousand articles explained that F18 has a new installer? Sheesh.

So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list. It works fine. If you want a nice polished version of newUI, you might want to wait for F19 or F20. It won't kill you. An operating system installer is a psychotically complex lump of code, it is not plausible that you can entirely rewrite one and get it working perfectly on the first try, and we never aimed to. We aimed to have something that broadly implemented the new design and worked reasonably well in simple cases, and that's what F18 has.

GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

(http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?77039-Alan-Cox-Calls-Fedora-18-quot-The-Worst-Red-Hat-Distro-quot/page4)

To which someone immediately pointed out the obvious:

Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.

I care a little...

[archer, the]

I don't have time to test multiple distros. I've been on Fedora since it was RedHat 4. Hearing they've messed up the installer this much makes me think I should switch.

Almost switched from Ubuntu back to Fedora

[Bilbo]

Oh great! I had been using Fedora since... well... since before Red Hat split Fedora off from their base install and went all corporate... Partly out of curiosity, I went to Ubuntu a couple of years, and found it very workable (especially since they weren't so pedantic about proprietary Nvidia drivers and mp3 codec's). However, ever since they introduced the collection of garbage that they dubbed "Unity", I've had nothing but trouble with it. I can get it to work, but I won't say it's pleasant. I WAS JUST ABOUT TO TRY GOING BACK TO FEDORA! I've actually fund Fedora 17 reasonably usable, and was hoping that maybe they had cleaned up some of the confusion they had created when they changed everything around in the UI. Looks like I'm sticking with Ubuntu for a while longer.

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[Anonymous Coward]

This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect.

Ha ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha ha!

Oh, dear!

Ha ha ha ha!

Windows 8.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[smash]

Selection is similar to the choice of "Would sir like a straightjacket or a frontal lobotomy?"

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[Tough Love]

Alan Cox: Ubuntu "Most useless and senseless desktop ever," Switches to Gentoo

You obviously don't know him. He will install xfce as soon as he figures out how apt-get works, which will take him about 2 nanoseconds.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[Darinbob]

In the old days we had a choice of shock therapy!

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[Tenebrousedge]

Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.

First, you're four years late on the PulseAudio rant, Unity works pretty well even if you don't like it, and you definitely didn't let the existence of Windows 8 get in the way of a good rant.

Nevertheless, this isn't exactly a new thing in the software world. It would be easier to find a project that avoided the practice, and in regards to shipping an operating system? Well, you just let me know when you manage to ship a bug free OS.

Red Hat isn't even the worst offender here. I've singled out Win8 already, but (and I apologize for mentioning it to a non-technical audience) Ruby has managed to release a new version of the language with "experimental features". The justification I got was something along the lines of "It's okay because none of the major libraries will rely on them."

However, I would urge everyone to be charitable. Change is good, even if it's rarely a smooth process. To the programmers reading this: let he who has never shipped a bug (or broken an API) throw the first stone. To the non-programmers: "We apologize for the inconvenience."

well...

[slashmydots]

At least he didn't switch to Windows 8. Then he'd eventually give up and just go Amish.

Re:well...

[steelfood]

I tried doing that, but I found that the average avian just don't like being put into a slingshot and launched at pigs. The pigs also didn't seem to like it either.

It worked right out of the box!

[rcamans]

I installed Fedora 18 64 bit today with absolutely no problems or questions. Did not read anything first. It just installed and worked. WTF is all this hooplah about? You guys need your diapers changed. Oh, wait, this is slashdot...

Re:It worked right out of the box!

[TheDarkener]

Seriously. I think all the Slashbots are just excited to repeat the great word.

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[DNS-and-BIND]

They are releasing it to find out what bugs are in it, then they will fix in the next version. Where do you live where this doesn't happen?

My experience is opposite... Fedora 18 is better!

[urdak]

I've been using Red Hat's linux distributions for 14 years, since I first switched my aging Slackware installation to Redhat 5.2. Since then, I've been upgrading or installing every new Redhat/Fedora release that came out.
The last few upgrades, to F15, F16 and F17 were a real pain - on every release the upgrade failed in the middle, or succeeded and left me with half the system not running and I needed to spend a whole day on fixing things (a person with less experience would just give up and switch to a different distribution...).
But the upgrade to F18 (with the new "fedup" tool) was surprisingly smooth. The upgrade just worked, and when the new system came up, everything just worked... A few annoying new bugs (like the new gphoto2 suddenly not working correctly, but that's not Fedora's fault) but nothing serious.
So if anything, F18 was the first time in years that I did *not* consider switch to Ubuntu right after the upgrade.

no no

[Mike Frett]

"Dear Slashdot, switching one system that run Ubuntu in a VM to Fedora into running Ubuntu does not constitute 'switching to Ubuntu'." - Alan

He is also giving up his work entirely for 'Family Reasons'. Even leaving Intel.

"I'm leaving the Linux world and Intel for a bit for family reasons." - Alan

You guys are all worked up over the Headline. =p

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[BlackPignouf]

They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution.

Sorry, what?
In the OSS world, 1.0 should come after so many alphas/betas/release candidates that it should work perfectly everywhere.
There are many good and very usable projects that are less than 0.3
If it's not ready at all, call it a 0.0.1b or something.

And the headline next week

[thegarbz]

Alan Cox: "Just finished compiling, looks good so far."

Isn't it nice?

[prefec2]

When you are a Windows user or a Mac OS user and you have the impression that the new desktops sucks, then you can go back to the old OS version, but that is not a solution for long, or you have to live with it. As a Linux user you can switch distros and you can even brag about it. You are free to make choices. And if things are really bad you can make your own and call it Mint or Arch or Pepper, Chilly (I guess these names are not used)

Re:Isn't it nice?

[jones_supa]

There's a reason Win and Mac don't go with various desktops: it would be a support nightmare. Which is exactly what we are seeing in the Linux world.

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[Bogtha]

I agree.

The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges

Turning out unfinished, buggy work and saying it's okay because you told people it was unfinished and buggy seems to me to be an attitude that is incompatible with ever releasing a high quality product.

Not Red Hat

[zdzichu]

Dammit, it was us, the Fedora Community, who released Fedora. Not Red Hat. It's not their distro.

Fedora is bleeding-edge

[devent]

I really don't understand what is the fuss about. Fedora 18 was just released, what are you expecting? From Wikipedia:

A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2.[8]

Fedora is a bleeding-edge distribution. Much like Debian Sid. Fedora is the playground for new technology that was always so. You can't expect to have a new version of Fedora and everything be perfect.

Just wait 6 months and upgrade then. So do I with my Fedora. I install it release+6 months and everything is fine.
You just can't compare Fedora with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian Stable etc. The goals are totally different.
If you want a bleeding-edge distribution with new technology then Fedora is the right distribution for you.
If you want a stable desktop then Debian Stable is the choice for you.

Get a clue dumbass

[SpaceLifeForm]

Just fucking google him. OMG. FMTT.

Re:Get a clue dumbass

[TheDarkener]

I know who he is. If Alan Cox said, "McDonald's makes the worst hamburger", would you repeat his testimony like the universal truth you believe it is too?

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[MartinG]

Someone did I believe, but it doesn't support encrypted root filesystems out of the box.

Recent hardware?

[SpaceLifeForm]

You might have got lucky.

HP provides Debian support?

[dutchwhizzman]

That is so funny. I was contracted to HP recently to manage Debian servers for their client. HP made us advise the customer to switch to either RedHat or Ubuntu because that had enterprise level support. I'd love to see where HP publicly advertises they support Debian, under what sort of SLA and at what price.

Re:HP provides Debian support?

[JonJ]

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/debian/index.html I'm sure they also support it since they've got drivers and software for the distro. I didn't bother looking for prices and stuff, but I'm certain you can put on your big boy pants and figure it out yourself. If you _really_ wanted to know.

Re:HP provides Debian support?

[JonJ]

It took me a whole 2 seconds to find that page via google. He got his own condescending tone in his post, with this part:

I'd love to see where HP publicly advertises they support Debian, under what sort of SLA and at what price.

Implying that this sort of thing does not exist, and Debian is nowhere near supported by HP, even if a quick google search can turn up that they actually have built their software and services around Debian in addition to RHEL and SLES. Also for some reason, he thinks it's funny. He just took some clueless salesperson at HP for their word, instead of doing the research and now he's taking pot shots at people who actually did their job in researching this.

Re:and said gnome3 sucks on ubuntu...

[unixisc]

Wouldn't he have gotten to try that on Fedora 18 itself? On Ubuntu, he can determine what he thinks about Unity

First rule about Fedora releases

[dutchwhizzman]

Wait at least 2 months before upgrading. Read other peoples problems and make sure you find the relevant fixes for those before you attempt the upgrade. Every time I did an upgrade in a rush I ended up getting large amounts of bullets in my foot. After 2 months, most stuff that's really broken or breaks too often has been found, people have found ways to get it working and often the package updates from Fedora fix a lot of bugs. Also, all the 3rd party stuff will have ready to run RPMs and repositories set up, so you don't have to jump through flaming hoops to get those upgraded as well.

I don't get it

[ApplePy]

I always test new Fedora releases on my laptop, not my work machine (Fedora user since FC4)... and other than the new disk partitioning scheme in the F18, I see nothing horrible. That is to say, the partitioning bit of Anaconda is fucking horrible in F18. 14 releases of Fedora for me, and I've been loyal... and this is fucking shit.

I'm a KDE user. Once installed, F18 with KDE is fine. Great. I love it. Fedora/KDE is the dog's bollocks.

My major beef is with the partitioning utility part of the installer. Fix that, Fedora crew, and you will regain my faith. Oh, and I want the option back to select packages.

I will not pitch a fit, or go drama-queen and go to NoobUntu. I love you, Fedora. But srsly. Fix that fucking installer. Nao.

Meanwhile, my work machines run F17. The best desktop Linux evar!!!, IMO.

subject

[Legion303]

18 may or may not suck (I have no experience with it), but is that any reason to switch to Fisher-Price linux?

Re:Left RH a decade ago

[jones_supa]

Ubuntu desktops were fine, before that Unity crap. That pushed me back to fvwm2 --- which still completely rocks!

*facepalm*

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[RDW]

In the old days we had a choice of shock therapy!

Slackware is still available!

Wasn't Fedora essentially created to be a test bed

[Salpula]

I've been running Fedora on and off since its first release, and I will admit I haven't installed most version since ~8 including 18. However, I had an install of the Fedora 17 XFCE variant on my laptop and was quite happy with it. I never recall Fedora being a distro that "just worked", there were usually several pages of install notes to go through from various people to fix everything on each release, and often times packages that were broken and needed to be compiled from source. Even as recently as Fedora 14 I installed the release, updated, and a borked version of MDADM cause my whole 7.5TB raid to be corrupted. I seem to recall (perhaps incorrectly) that its original break from RedHat was supposed to be evaluate, test, and mature new features, drivers, and Kernels before rolling it into RHEL.
I think I feel the way he does about Fedora, only toward ubuntu. It took two installs and hours of fudging to get 12.04 LTS installed on my gaming rig for the Steam Linux Beta.
A quote from Wikipedia.org:

"One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies.[5][6] Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux distributions.[7] A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2.[8] This promotes leading-edge software because it frees developers from some backward compatibility restraints, but it also makes Fedora a poor choice for product development (e.g., embedded systems), which usually requires long-term vendor-support, unavailable with any version of Fedora."

Years ahead

[DeBaas]

that means I was years ahead of Alan Cox! Maybe he'll follow in a few years to Mint.....

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[realityimpaired]

if he'd installed xubuntu to begin with, he wouldn't have needed to install xfce.... though he'd still need to uninstall the kitchen sink crap that comes bundled with it....

Interesting Place To Runaway To

[assertation]

Ubuntu is still *one* of the best distros. As someone who has been using it since it came out I am surprised Cox chose to runaway from Fedora to Ubuntu. Ubuntu used to be the most "least hassle" and user friendly distro. I would say with the default desktop of Unity that title now belongs to MINT linux and that is what I am putting on the new home PC I am buying in March.

Changes, just because

[apexwm]

The new Fedora 18 installer is not good, I totally agree with Cox. The old installer was much more intuitive, and flexible at the same time. The new installer is dumbed down so far that it is cumbersome for those that want a custom installation. Why was it changed????? I've found this, combined with Gnome 3, add to many frustrations. And I specifically work with new GNU/Linux users so this adds to their frustration as well. To be honest, Fedora 14 was the last great Fedora distribution, because it was easy to set up and install, and didn't require a bunch of tweaking because of Gnome 3. However, I have found that doing a minimal Fedora 18 install, then installing MATE after it is up and running provides a fairly clean and usable system.

Gentoo...

[coldproduct]

What is your beef with gentoo? (ducks the responses).

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[StuartHankins]

I'm shocked they removed that option.
<ducks>

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[StuartHankins]

Yep. We use xfce on server GUIs because it's stable and predictable. No retraining needed. On desktops you can use whatever you want, and you support it yourself. Everyone's happy.

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[higuita]

Agree, some distros just want to release (to keep release schedule, to keep cools names, to look updated, to show up in news, etc) and yet keep releasing known broken software. They are destroying the trust users have on those distros every time one user have a working system, see a new release announcement and try to update to that latest release, only to find that its system doesn't work any more.

the excuse that users must read the release notes is really a bad excuse, many time they don't really warn about the problems user will find, but instead talk about the "cool new features" and how good it will be. So instead of showing that things will not work, they almost hide it, after all, a release is a checkpoint of a working system.

If its broken, call it BETA, ALPHA, whatever, not a RELEASE!

Slackware and Debian are great examples how things should work. Both try to release on schedule ( about twice a year on slackware, one a year to debian), but there is no release is there are known problems (unless its a very limited problem).. So slackware took 1 and half years to jump from 13.37 to 14 (the latest release) and debian took the same time to just freeze wheezy (the next release) and 6 month later it still isnt released.
Both distros are looked as very stable, they just work!

If anyone wants a more bleeding edge on those distros, they run the -current (slackware) or sid (debian) and fix things when its broken... but releases are always stable!!

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[geminidomino]

AFAIK, none of the DEs, and I'm not even sure about X.org itself, are part of Ubuntu server releases, and as such aren't maintained for the 5-year LTS period.

Oblig:
<include why_put_gui_on_server_anyway.h>

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[StuartHankins]

You put a GUI on a server because not everyone is comfortable with a command line, or are using tools which require a GUI. In my environment, I'm the only Linux guy and if I'm not available and need a Windows Admin to do something, they better have a clicky-clicky or it won't get done. In my environment we also have a third party contractor who supports his point-of-sale software but wants a GUI so he can clicky-clicky through the file system, run a graphical FTP program etc when necessary. He's not willing to install anything other than VNC on his Windows machine.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[geminidomino]

Ye flipping gods. I am SO sorry. *backpat* It'll get better soon!

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[rossz]

A server needs a gui like a fish needs a banjo.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[erroneus]

GUI on the server:

For the rich information feedback. I'm great with command line for lots of things... simple things. But when performing tasks which might be assisted or made easier by having nice things like copy and paste, buttons and check boxes, I will gravitate to that when it's helpful.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[RockDoctor]

Indeed it is. And one of these days I'm likely to go back to it - I'm getting pretty hacked-off with Ubuntu fucking with my desktop organisation too.

Re:Whatever

[UltraZelda64]

RPM hell, also known generically as "dependency hell." Again, dependency resolution is a part of the package management system, not the package format itself. You should be slamming either the distro's sub-par repositories for not containing everything you need, and/or its pathetic dependency resolution (or put another way, lack thereof). I wouldn't blame that on RPM. The damn things could be zipped up for all I care and they'd probably still work if the rest of the package management tools are good and the repository is working correctly.

Amazon icon on the Unity taskbar

[falconwolf]

>If you don't like it you can uninstall it.

That's like saying if someone shits in your bed you can always wash your bedding. The fact is that they shit in your bed.

No it isn't, it's nothing like that. People intentionally install Ubuntu on a PC, they are not forced to. Most people don't expect, nor give permission, for someone to shit on their bed though. You'd better get your comparisons right. What would be a more appropriate comparison is if you change bed sheets and put sheets with shit on them on the bed. That is your choice, you're not forced to accept it.

Falcon

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[smash]

For those playing at home, Fedora is the straight-jacket...

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[Deus.1.01]

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me then a frontal lobotomy.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[Deus.1.01]

X is the system which provides you a cursor that allows you to select a term window.

Re:MS Windows and Office

[falconwolf]

*shrugs* they have a right to expect to be paid for their work, just as you have a right to decide that the price is too high. The problem is, if you decide the price is too high, most people don't take the ethical course of action and install something like Linux, they take the unethical course of action and pirate Windows.

MS can lower it's prices, and did in places like China and India. At one tyme MS was selling Windows for $5 at then current foreign exchange rates. But that's beside the point, most people don't buy Windows, they buy a PC with Windows preinstalled. And as I said above buyers of PCs with Windows preinstalled still have to activate it. While I disagree with those who illegally install and use Windows and other commercial software, by lowering prices more people who pay for it. Sell 10 million licenses for $100 a pop, or sell 100 million for $20 and make twice as much money. And that's what MS does for OEMs, an OEM will pay much less per PC to install MS Window/Office than an individual will because the OEM buys in volume.

Windows 8 *is* a steaming pile of donkey poop, however, and even *free* would be too expensive for me. My gaming machine will continue to run Win7 until my favourite games run on Steam/Linux (or when I'm bored enough of them that running on Wine won't be too much of a hassle), at which point it'll be reinstalled with the same version of Linux that's on my main laptop.

There is Steam for Linux being worked on. I know games is a sticking point for many people but I don't play computer, or other, games myself. At least not now, I last played computer games three or four years ago in vocational therapy.

Falcon

Re:Not quite the same thing hairyfeet

[dbIII]

Modded down to zero "offtopic" when it's perfectly on topic for the above posts? If you don't like something moderators at least mod it down for the right reason.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[aliquis]

You obviously don't know him. He will install xfce as soon as he figures out how apt-get works, which will take him about 2 nanoseconds.

There's something wrong with this picture after the switch. I can't really tell why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

Re:Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoro

[Waccoon]

Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect.

I'd like to know why marketing hype is so important when releasing a free product. Commercial products I can understand, but not FOSS.

Is it fear of looking like a laggard, or just plain ego?

Also, I cringe when developers insist that the bugs will eventually be fixed, but at the same time defend their awful designs. Some of the issues with the Fedora installer are not really bugs, but poor design choices. Those tend to be the result of inexperience or haughty stubbornness, and usually don't get fixed in any hurry.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[helix2301]

I gave up after fedora 10 to do anything on the OS is a major project. It's not a very user friendly desktop OS and app support is limited.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[allo]

you have a gui on the client. its called xterm, or if you like a better terminal urxvt.