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

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!!

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: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?

Worst Debian Distro

[seyyah]

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

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?

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: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.