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

[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

[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

[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

[smash]

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

Re:forgot RH7

[hawkinspeter]

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

Re:forgot RH7

[Jesus_666]

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

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

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

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.

Darkside

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome Alan! We've been waiting for you.

  ONE OF US!! ONE OF US!!

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

[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

[rrohbeck]

I guess you haven't tried Debian experimental.

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.

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!

[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!

[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:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

These people have lives.

Duuuh.

[lophophore]

Duuuh.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

Worst Debian Distro

[seyyah]

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

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?)

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.

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: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: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.

And the headline next week

[thegarbz]

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

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!