Fedora 19 Alpha Released

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Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @07:34PM from the code-names-with-umlauts dept.

hypnosec writes "Following delays due to UEFI, the alpha version of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' has been released. The alpha version brings with it all the features of Fedora 19, including the updated desktop options – GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma 4.10 and MATE 1.6. Other new features include Developer's Assistant – a tool that would allow developers to code easily with ready templates, samples and more; OpenShift Origin – through which users will be able to deploy their own Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; Ruby 2.0.0; Scratch; Syslinux – provides for simplified booting of Fedora; systemd Resource Control – which allows for modification of service settings without requiring a reboot; and Checkpoint & Restore. Downloads and release notes available at the Fedora Project site."

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You lost me at... by FreshKarma · 2013-04-23 19:46 · Score: 0

...GNOME 3.8

--
The future ain't what it used to be.
1. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 19:50 · Score: 0
  
  I know it's tough, but if you don't like Gnome 3.8 feel free to not install it and use the package manager to install something else.
2. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 20:05 · Score: 1
  
  Or grab the source and build a GNOME 2. It's not necessarily simple to do, but nothing stops you.
  What's sad about the whole thing is that no distro seams to be able to offer BOTH 2 and 3 at least for now, so that users can use an environment that actually works instead of a slightly less working environment which may become better in a couple of years or so.
3. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 20:13 · Score: 0
  
  http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
4. Re:You lost me at... by Ignacio · 2013-04-23 20:31 · Score: 1
  
  And a little further down, MATE 1.6. Fixed.
5. Re:You lost me at... by MancunianMaskMan · 2013-04-23 20:31 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Gnome 3.8 comes with "Classic mode" which re-introduces features like the top-left App menu and the window switcher panel at the bottom of the screen, but built on Gnome3 technology.
  It's a bit like Windows 8.1 re-introducing the Start menu.
  Maybe one day we'll wake up and the Gnome shell and Windows 8 were all a bad dream.
6. Re:You lost me at... by Ignacio · 2013-04-23 20:35 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  No one offers GNOME 2 because it's effectively dead. MATE is the replacement.
7. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 20:42 · Score: 1
  
  Gnome 3.8 comes with "Classic mode" which re-introduces features like the top-left App menu and the window switcher panel at the bottom of the screen, but built on Gnome3 technology.
  It's a bit like Windows 8.1 re-introducing the Start menu.
  Maybe one day we'll wake up and the Gnome shell and Windows 8 were all a bad dream.
  Stop ruining his bitching session.
8. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 21:40 · Score: 1
  
  No one offers GNOME 2 because it's effectively dead.
  At least Red Hat will support GNOME 2 on RHEL 6 until 2020.
  
  MATE is the replacement.
  It would have been so much better if things had just worked. We have a lot of multiuser machines and not everyone wants to switch to GNOME 2 yet. We would have been so much happier if we could have GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 available in the login window and let users choose which one they wanted. It's just ridiculous that we have to rename everything just to get things to work side by side.
9. Re:You lost me at... by dbIII · 2013-04-23 22:22 · Score: 2
  
  Gnome 2 just won't work with the new gimp and vice versa. After so many decades of applications being able to co-exist so long as the right bits were available, the gnome people managed to finally being something that may as well be DLL hell to *nix. They really did base it on WinME, but theirs, without the hookers and blackjack.
10. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-23 23:19 · Score: 2
  
  Can anyone explain to me the reasoning behind the hatred of gnome 3?
  Besides the whole "my gui doesn't work like win95 anymore and I really want to use something named gnome" crybaby shtick, I mean. Is there something besides that which I'm missing?
11. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 23:31 · Score: 0
  
  Gentoo does offer both Gnome 2.32 and 3.x (3.6 now, 3.8 is still a work-in-progress)
12. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 23:39 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Some of us manages hundred or thousands of Linux desktops and workstations. One of the reasons why we were able to deploy Linux at all and throw out Windows XP was in large parts thanks to GNOME and all the great work that has been used to refine it.
  GNOME 3 is at a stage where it might work on someones personal laptop, but it's not yet something which you want to deploy it in a large enterprise environment. There's a lot of good ideas in GNOME 3, but it's not yet ready. This would have been a non-issue if we had been able to have both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 installed side by side in a setup supported by the distributions. I know that MATE exists, and that's good; but it's sad that we had to rename everything and break a lot of things that worked.
13. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 23:41 · Score: 1
  
  Interesting. Can you have both of them installed at the same time?
14. Re:You lost me at... by KiloByte · 2013-04-24 00:02 · Score: 2
  
  Gnome 2 just won't work with the new gimp and vice versa.
  Gimp works just fine with MATE or XFCE, heck, all of these use gtk-2 rather than the pile of regressions called gtk-3. On most distributions you can't install "real" Gnome 2 any more because Gnome 3 hijacked its names despite having little to do with it, but that's been worked around.
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
15. Re:You lost me at... by ssam · 2013-04-24 00:03 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Its pretty much impossible to install gnome2 and gnome3 on the same system, or have them both in the same repo (unlike plenty of other similar sized projects what you can have multiple versions installed (KDE3 and 4, as many GCC, python and kernel versions as you want))
  https://lwn.net/Articles/466872/
  mate solved this difficult technical problem, mostly by doing 's/gnome/mate/g' (since then they have modernised the code, removed most of the deprecated libraries, and added useful features)
16. Re:You lost me at... by KiloByte · 2013-04-24 00:05 · Score: 0
  
  Sadly, Gnome 3.8 "classic mode" is a bad joke that has the superficial look of some details but hardly any of the functionality.
  Just install MATE or XFCE and never look at Gnome again. From the direction they're going it doesn't seem Gnome 3 has any chances of being usable this decade.
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
17. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-24 00:09 · Score: 1
  
  It's been a while since I actually tried, but I'm under the impression that it should work as long as you install it under a different prefix, such as /opt.
18. Re:You lost me at... by ssam · 2013-04-24 00:09 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  dear gnome 2 users. here is gnome 3.0. we have changed everything, and it wont run on you 3 year old laptop any more. hope you like it because it will be really hard to keep using gnome2 while keeping up to date with other packages.if you don't like it please just wait a few years and we'll bring back some of the old features as a classic mode. hey, where have you all gone?
19. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 00:13 · Score: 1
  
  I basically completely agree with this.
  I like gnome 3 specifically for these reasons. I like the ideas, and I like where it's going, and I actually think it's great for personal use.
  I'm 100% sympathetic to it's effect on larger, centrally-administered networks, but I still don't really understand the hate for it. Can't you just keep using gnome 2, or xfce, or kde, or whatever? Is the fallback mode that awful?
  I agree that it's not ready for primetime, but that doesn't explain the vitriol, especially since so many people hint to it being fundamentally flawed or immoral, as opposed to new and not suitable for corporate use.
20. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 00:15 · Score: 0, Flamebait
  
  No, idiot. I've spent more time than it's worth doing that and the vast, vast majority of what it's revealed are:
  a) legitimate but ultimately insignificant bug reports which are not fundamental design flaws
  (the minority)
  or,
  b) people who literally have zero ability to differentiate their emotions from reality and yell and scream about how awful it is because it's different.
  While I understand the sentiment, I don't care at all. If it doesn't feel like windows 95, and you hate it, that's cool, but it doesn't make it bad.
  If that's not you, and your complaints center almost entirely around "it's buggy", I don't really understand the hate for it. It's certainly annoying, but buggy gui applications is a "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" thing for me -- completely expected. If it bothers you that much, why don't you just use xfce or something instead? Is the hate just because it changed and you don't want to keep using some old version of it?
  I mean, I get it. But I don't get it. I understand that people can be fucking retarded, but it's fucking retarded. Someone who uses gnome 2 on their ubuntu 9 install is incredibly angry that Fedora 19 now ships with gnome 3. Ok? Is there something I'm missing here?
  Judging from the time I've spent looking into it, and the general tone of responses whenever someone asks, the answer is apparently not.
21. Re:You lost me at... by ssam · 2013-04-24 00:24 · Score: 2
  
  it is very different. some people prefer gnome2 over gnome3, just like some people prefer kde or e17 or xfce or xmonad. it would be odd for a distro to say we are removing gnome, you will use e17 now. (you can't parallel install gnome2 and gnome3, or easily have them both in the same distro).
  it has higher system requirements. on my netbook i could no longer use an external display, because my GPU did not support large enough openGL textures. with gnome2 it was fine. llvmpipe may be a solution now, but i can't imagine the performance is good on a 32bit atom.
  it has new bugs. gnome3 used to crash a lot for me. sometimes the only way to get it to log back in after was to delete the config file. i assume its better in 3.8, but i am happy with mate these days.
  i think a good analogy is to image that the kernel developers removed ext4 now that they have btrfs. they could argue that btrfs has lots of new features, and that you would be stupid to want to use an old deadend file system that did not even have data checksumming and snapshots. that would go down well. (i use btrfs :-) )
22. Re:You lost me at... by ssam · 2013-04-24 00:32 · Score: 1
  
  might be doable. but i suspect not in a way that a distro could offer them both and have selecting between them at gdm work (most distros would not accept the kind of hacks you would need).
23. Re:You lost me at... by bluefoxlucid · 2013-04-24 00:44 · Score: 0
  
  I'm more amused that they're wasting time on Scratch. Scratch is a joke; the concept's been done. There have been games that targeted kids (back in the 5 1/4 inch days) which relied on "dialogue" that was free-form... in the form of little boxes with pictures, emoticons, etc. Essentially it worked because it was a valid, restricted, easily interpreted lexicon--a programming language. This comes up every once in a while, occasionally gets hailed as an amazing way to teach kids programming, which goes into "if we teach kids programming, Utopia!", which never happens.
  
  --
  Support my political activism on Patreon.
24. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-24 00:44 · Score: 1
  
  Absolutely, that's the problem. If the distributions could offer both GNOME 2 and 3, hopefully even at the same time, then I would be very happy.
25. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 01:08 · Score: 0
  
  MATE just works for me. The only problem I found was xscreeensaver not starting because gnome one was also installed, removing it works. The only other issue I have with F18 is with networkmanager sometimes failing to setup LAN after suspend/switch from Wlan, but it's hard to reproduce.
26. Re:You lost me at... by dbIII · 2013-04-24 01:32 · Score: 1
  
  That is my point - old distros with a real gnome 2 (eg. RHEL, CentOS) cannot use the new gimp so the only way is to remove gnome 2 and use a "workalike" which doesn't yet support everything that gnome 2 does.
27. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 02:21 · Score: 0
  
  They already do. One of them has been renamed to "MATE" to avoid name collisions.
  Try and keep up.
28. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 02:28 · Score: 0
  
  Here's my reason. I have used all of the following DEs and could live with any of them today.
  1) Windows 7
  2) Windows 8
  3) Unity
  4) XFCE
  5) Cinnamon
  Currently, XFCE is my favorite, and Unity is my number two choice (note, I'm a math teacher, not a developer, so many of the issues with Unity that I've heard don't really affect me). Unity would be #1 if it wasn't so buggy. I tried using Gnome 3.6 in Debian Wheezy and I couldn't tolerate it (if I switch from Ubuntu to Debian with Wheezy becoming stable, I'll go with XFCE). I could figure out Unity within a minute, same with Windows 8, same with XFCE, same with Cinnamon. I couldn't figure out efficient workflows with Gnome. I'm reasonably intelligent, and I don't think the problem is with me (who knows though - some people say they love Gnome Shell).
29. Re:You lost me at... by kthreadd · 2013-04-24 02:30 · Score: 1
  
  That's the problem. We shouldn't have to rename something to MATE. It should have just worked.
30. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  1. If you're looking for an idiot, you should probably look in a mirror.
  2. If you can seriously defend the way for instance virtual desktops are handled, and how you're forced to continuously race your mouse-pointer back and forth across your widescreen monitor to accomplish anything with them, you're welcome. And NO, keyboard shortcuts or plugins and what not does NOT qualify as "solutions". Those are epic fail workarounds.
  3. That's just the beginning. If you're serious about finding out what's wrong with it, you should contact a university near you, where they train any kind of students within cognitive science, or do anything related to HCI. Just don't forget to take your pills.
31. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 02:52 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for your viewpoint. I basically agree with this on the major points completely.
  It sounds like I had similar experiences when I first tried it for one of the earlier 3.x releases (not the original rollout, which sounded like an extinction-level event). It crashed frequently, there were module incompatibilities that would cause it to hang with gdm, there were usability issues that seemed like they were obviously of the "we'll get to that later" nature, etc. It had issues with certain graphics cards. But it wasn't fundamentally flawed -- it just wasn't there yet, like many other things linux.
  They probably should have done a better job retiring gnome2 from the sound of it, like a more graceful handoff to something like MATE. I just don't really understand the hatred. If you want to use gnome2, and you want gnome2 to stay the same, then it's probably better off to be forked into some kind of long-term retirement plan. I mean, does anyone really think gnome2 is the be-all, end-all of computer desktops? For me, it was always just a fairly nice desktop, that worked, but didn't particularly have anything special about it. There are others which not only perform similar tasks, but do lots of them better. And now gnome can make the major leap to something new.
  I understand liking the old and familiar, but I don't quite get why that causes so much outrage? If people want something like that, they can keep using what they were using, or use a fork like MATE, or use something similar like xfce. Or they can be like one of those people that still uses fvwm or blackbox or whatever for decades.
  I feel similarly about unity and windows 8, although I find both of those to be less interesting, if more stable and refined, than gnome3. And after my initial experiences with gnome 3.earlyversion, which were mediocre but interesting, gnome 3.6 seems like an incredible improvement over it. Hopefully 3.8 and further continue to improve it like that.
32. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 03:15 · Score: 0
  
  xfce or mate?
33. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 03:20 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I'm expressly not looking for idiots. I wanted a real answer to why the hatred for gnome3 is so strong, but it seems like the only strong criticisms of it are idiotic in nature.
  
  2. If you can seriously defend the way for instance virtual desktops are handled, and how you're forced to continuously race your mouse-pointer back and forth across your widescreen monitor to accomplish anything with them, you're welcome. And NO, keyboard shortcuts or plugins and what not does NOT qualify as "solutions". Those are epic fail workarounds.
  how is that a fundamental flaw? It's an implementation detail. It can be annoying to repeatedly move your mouse from the top-left to the bottom-right, sure. It would be nice if the "hotspot" for it were configurable or something in case you found it more convenient somewhere else. Same goes for the notification try thing at the bottom. If you're basing your hatred of it on this, you're (surprise) an idiot! Gnome3 is interesting because of its overviews and workspaces, not because of which key-combinations and mouse-clicks it currently has you perform. Note that this is especially annoying if you are fighting the ui (i want my windows 95 back!!!!!), instead of just using it -- if you don't know that you can drag the background up and down in the activities overview similar to how you can drag-and-drop individual windows, then yes, this is tedious. But scrolling the workspaces by dragging is convenient, doesn't require you to move your mouse all the way across your widescreen monitor, and is one of those things you find to be so intuitive that you quickly forget you can't do it in other environments and begin to take it for granted.
  also, keyboard shortcuts do not qualify as solutions? what?
  This is linux. Keypresses shouldn't be absolutely necessary in a gui environment, and it'd be nice if there were more, or they were more configurable, but what the hell are you talking about if you only consider mouse input for everything? One of the truly interesting things about gnome3, especially compared to other desktop environments, is that keyboard shortcuts actually feel powerful and integrated. In older environments, keyboard shortcuts are essentially shortcuts to let you not use the gui anymore, like a launcher, or alt-tabbing and its virtual desktop equivalent. Gnome-shell is the first environment I've used where the super key is a blessing instead of an afterthought, where pressing it doesn't make you feel like somebody dropped something on your mouse and right-clicked somewhere.
  
  3. That's just the beginning. If you're serious about finding out what's wrong with it, you should contact a university near you, where they train any kind of students within cognitive science, or do anything related to HCI. Just don't forget to take your pills.
  so this is one of those "there are so many reasons I hate it, I can't even think of any" things. Alright, buddy. I hope your freshman year in that program with an HCI class is going well for you.
34. Re: You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 03:41 · Score: 0
  
  Congratulations! Your post perfectly describes the issue people have with Windows 8.
35. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 03:48 · Score: 1
  
  well that's basically how I feel, too. Except I've found gnome-shell to be pleasnat and usable, especially after installing a newer version and just trying it out for a bit. I originally found myself excessively having to switch to the activities/workspace overview mode because of, say, having a bunch of pdf or documents open whose thumbnails were difficult to distinguish between or because the thumbnails felt like they had a randomness to their ordering. And not knowing that I could slide between workspaces by click-and-dragging the shaded background area in the overview.
  but that's not really hate. I mean, it would stop you from using it, yeah, but if that's the problem then people can just switch to something like Cinnamon or MATE or xfce, which all seem to be fine enough and offer the familiar desktop paradigm. There are lots of comments and hatred for it in a way that makes it sound like it must so fundamentally flawed that the source code should be deleted and forgotten, but nobody seems to ever be able to back up their strong feelings for it.
36. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 03:52 · Score: 0
  
  The problem is entirely in the way we conflate naming of libraries, packages, development groups, user communities, and "brands". Saying "gnome 2 is now mate" is hugely disruptive to a massive number of users and user organizations because of this. You cannot do a reasonable in-place upgrade of systems in the field, because all binary linkage changes. You cannot trivially take existing "gnome" apps and continue to use them with "mate" until you modify their sources and build tools and then recompile them. They've introduced a new flag-day event to change out all naming in a system, instead of doing something sensible like introducing gnome3 as the new name that wouldn't conflict with deployed systems.
  Many users of gnome 2 who are still upset are probably like me. I was forced into using it by the decisions of distributors like Fedora and major app developers who made their apps depend on it. I was never interested in the gnome project's mission particularly. I was irritated with the cult-like way the gnome project expected all their users to follow whatever bizarre path they decided to push the package names. I switched to XFCE, so it shouldn't bother me anymore, according to the reasoning in all these discussions.
  But I am still being irritated by the collateral damage it is causing to systems I have to use. Apps continue to drag in gnome dependencies because they followed the name "gnome" instead of the functionality "gnome 2". Casual user support questions, from friends or family who have learned to treat me as a knowledgeable resource, keep forcing me to look at gnome 3 because my decision to change to XFCE doesn't automatically apply to all of them as well.
  We are annoyed that our default position of "keep using what worked well enough" has been made into the active change, while "switch to something new and disruptive" has been made into the default action. The complicit behavior of gnome developers and the distributors has corralled a mass of unwitting users into an experimental new user community via a sleight of hand change to names and defaults, and we find that repugnant. If you've got something new and different to show us, give us a choice to look at it. Don't ram it down our throats like we've waited our whole lives for the opportunity.
  Most of the above applies equally to Fedora as well. I've switched my personal systems to CentOS for now (because we use RHEL and CentOS at work), but still cannot ignore Fedora entirely because of other users around me. They too have had a sleight of hand drop them into an increasingly broken environment in the name of progress, by people who seem to have divergent agendas from long-term users.
37. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-24 04:07 · Score: 1
  
  thanks for your input, as well.
  I 100% understand and sympathize with this. The release of gnome3 was completely mismanaged and caused all kinds of collateral damage, but for me, the reaction to it is separate from the desktop. I like the product, just not how it was done.
  It's especially true for me with Fedora. RHEL and CentOS are great, in my opinion, but Fedora is basically a non-starter because of issues like this that ripple their way throughout an entire installation. I originally tried installing a Fedora release so that I could test out gnome-shell, just to see what it was like, and it was just an awful experience. Trying it out on other "experimental" or more DIY distro installs like Debian wheezy and gentoo required poking and prodding, but it was a more comfortable style of effort to get it working. And after it was, it was great.
  The way gnome3, Fedora, and Canonical (with unity, and moving which side the close buttons on windows are) have tried to move forward by cannonballing the pool is aggravating and very reminiscent of 1990s Microsoft or 2000s Apple for sure, so I hate it too. But I'm also sick of the traditional desktop ("i want my windows95") enough to want some progress, so I am very interested in gnome-shell. Hopefully the gnome guys can take it to heart.
38. Re:You lost me at... by jandrese · 2013-04-24 04:52 · Score: 1
  
  To me Gnome 3 still feels like a beta, with a bunch of features planned but not implemented yet that were working in Gnome 2. Also, it looks like shit because most of the machines I use don't have particularly good graphics cards and Gnome 3's fallback mode doesn't work for beans.
  
  --
  
  I read the internet for the articles.
39. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 05:58 · Score: 0
  
  As a programmer and researcher, the desktop has had no real improvement for me since the days of fvwm2 (before the joke of fvwm95) but lots of pointless churn. The only qualitative improvements I can see since then are in raw performance (attributable to hardware improvements), multi-screen support, and the LCD sub-sampled font rendering. Most of this came from deeper X improvements with very little connection to any particular desktop environment project.
  I've had everything I need since the beginning: virtual desktops that I can switch with a control+arrow hot key, lots of xterm and emacs windows so I can grapple with my actual computing tasks, a viable web browser so I can look up online references, and window management functions that make me efficient (focus follow mouse, no raise on input). The majority of my interaction is reading and editing of text whether in large source files, small scripts, or command-line buffers, and running jobs. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  If there is one improvement that could be made to the experience for me, it would be hooks to have my chosen editor handle editing in all user-entry buffers in every app. In other words, expanding the VISUAL environment setting to have a full featured emacs buffer/frame embedded wherever I need to do text entry, whether in a GUI or CLI program.
40. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 09:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Ok, I'll keep this brief.
  Anything that makes you move your cursor back and forth for miles during a day is just plain fail. It's not just bloody annoying, it's an ergonomic problem, and it shows that you actually didn't think things through.
  I specifically dismissed plugins and keyboard shortcuts because they are A) far from intuitively discoverable, B) indistinguishable from magic to any non-hard core user, and C) it's the absolute favorite excuse for gnome-apologists when you point out a flaw in the UI. I'd be a wealthy man if I had a penny every time I've heard "there's a shortcut for that!", or "there's a plugin for that!".
  You see, the point is that these things are meant to be things you can learn if you're a serious user willing to invest some time to increase your productivity. That's why VI/VIM is absolutely fine. It's an expert tool. I thought the entire idea with Gnome was not to fall into that category. Or is it constantly losing those "confusing" features (see the new Natuilus for a fresh example) because it's used by easily confused experts? Shortcuts are indeed not meant to be used as escape routes for anyone who wants to keep their sanity. In fact, just the fact that people keep referring to them as "the way to do it" in a GUI, should ring a metric ton of alarm-bells. Or does Gnome claim to have reinvented DOS?
  I don't get this harping about "Windows 95", btw. Attempt at "guilt by association"? An obvious fallacy, which doesn't do anything positive for your position. (As a side note, I'd like to point out that Microsoft has produced a lot of turds over the years, but the "Windows 95" UI is (also used in W2k until they ruined it in XP but I guess it doesn't sound as bad to accuse people of wanting their w2k back, right?), despite its warts a very clean and useable UI.)
  Stuff that relies on magic, stuff that does things just because you happen to park your mouse cursor somewhere arbitrarily decided to be "special", stuff which forces you to run the desktop marathon daily for the most basic usage or learn magic codes, or just in general totally gets in your way (one display, one window, one Führer, MAXIMIZE EVERYTHING! FULLSCREEN IS NORMAL!!ONEONEELVENTY!!!) because you're supposed to do things "the gnome" way are just failures in comparison. Fancy graphics and a later date of packaging is completely irrelevant, what matters is if you can do your job without tearing your hair out.
  TL;DR, it needs to be effective, reasonably intuitive and above all discoverable, unless you're talking about expert systems. Gnome3 is none of that.
  Thank you for your attempt at being condescending, epic fail there too. And no, I don't take HCI classes, but I know people who have. Amusingly, they tell me explicitly Gnome is frequently held up in class as an example of how not to do. And they are not freshmen, btw.
  Now, if you want to keep flinging insults around, fine. I've told you were you can find plenty of valid criticism of Gnome3, but I somehow get the feeling you're not really interested in it.
  And that's kind of the core of it afaic, I guess. What grates me about Gnome3, isn't so much it's pretty obvious problems, but the absolute arrogant, narrow minded, condescending and childish attitude of it's developers and their remaining sycophants. Their reaction to criticism has from day one been to accuse people who speak up of being "haters", "trolls", or "ignorant", "we know better than you", or, when everything else fails, just act like ostriches.
  Anyway, it's water under the bridge. They've flat out refused to listening to the users they had, and now they barely have any ones left, to their great surprise. Well, the rest of us aren't, we've moved on.
  And with that, I'm out. Peace.
41. Re:You lost me at... by dr_blurb · 2013-04-24 20:36 · Score: 1
  
  after about 12 years of Red Hat then Fedora,
  I switched to Fuduntu, and very pleased about it.
  gnome 2, bottom panel the way I want it :)
  (only thing still missing is the netspeed applet)
42. Re:You lost me at... by Lakitu · 2013-04-25 00:41 · Score: 1
  
  I specifically dismissed plugins and keyboard shortcuts because they are A) far from intuitively discoverable, B) indistinguishable from magic to any non-hard core user, and C) it's the absolute favorite excuse for gnome-apologists when you point out a flaw in the UI.
  We're not talking about some convoluted 5-key shortcuts here. We're talking about pressing the super key.
  
  I don't get this harping about "Windows 95", btw. Attempt at "guilt by association"? An obvious fallacy, which doesn't do anything positive for your position. (As a side note, I'd like to point out that Microsoft has produced a lot of turds over the years, but the "Windows 95" UI is (also used in W2k until they ruined it in XP but I guess it doesn't sound as bad to accuse people of wanting their w2k back, right?), despite its warts a very clean and useable UI.)
  I mention people wanting win95 because win95 has set the standard for what graphical interfaces should be like. Win7, despite all of its changes, is essentially a windows 95 interface on a fundamental level. Same goes for gnome2. If you feel insulted by it, maybe it's because clamoring for a 20 year old interface that wasn't particularly great when it first came out is a little embarassing after it's been pointed out to you. Sure, it's "clean" or "usable", but so is twm or blackbox or whatever. Like I said, no one's really going to hold it against you for being one of the diehards who wants those until you feel the need to hold everyone back because of it.
  
  Stuff that relies on magic, stuff that does things just because you happen to park your mouse cursor somewhere arbitrarily decided to be "special"
  Yes, yes, yes, we get it! Moving your mouse to the top-left corner is a crime against humanity. The people demand the ability to move their mouse to the corner and clicking on the button there instead.
  
  And that's kind of the core of it afaic, I guess. What grates me about Gnome3, ...
  well, at least you admitted you're one of the people who can't distinguish their annoyance with the gnome people's management skills from anything else and takes it out on the UI. It would be preferable for you to do this in a way similar to the other responses my question got instead of being insulted by it, of course.
43. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-25 05:46 · Score: 0
  
  Gnome 1 sucked
  Gnome 2 sucked donkey balls
  Gnome 3 sucks rotting donkey balls
  Windows 95's interface is superior in every way to Gnome 3, Unity, and Windows 8.
44. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-25 07:04 · Score: 0
  
  People hate things that suck.
  Apparantly you love things that suck
45. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-25 07:14 · Score: 0
  
  So you are in a group of about 20 people who actually like that dogshit.
  grats?
46. Re:You lost me at... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-26 01:06 · Score: 0
  
  virt-manager on gnome2 came up in a second maybe 2-3 seconds max. Thank to gnome3 I'm in a freaking 21th century: it takes more than 10 seconds. Same python based app to startup. Same system but just gnome3 instead of gnome2. I see no diference on the virt-manager aperance. Well accualy a see: do have only "X" button on right-top corner insted of three buttons. This is just an example. I use Gentoo as my main distro on my laptop. I loved it for its speed but gnome3 show me how a windows user must have felt running vista. It is 21th century we sould be faster... atleat faster than we are right now...
Good luck with that code name by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 19:46 · Score: 0

Let's just see how much breaks with that ASCII compliant name. :-)
1. Re:Good luck with that code name by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 20:11 · Score: 0
  
  On Fedora? In 2013? Nothing will break.
2. Re:Good luck with that code name by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 22:43 · Score: 1
  
  It doesn't matter if things do break, we'll never find out thanks to this ;-)
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=922433
3. Re:Good luck with that code name by charles2678 · 2013-04-24 03:04 · Score: 1
  
  To start if off -- we had a report of pyramid_debugtoolbar failing with a UnicodeDecodeError this morning (on Python 2, where platform.platform() returns a non-7-bit-clean bytestring rather than a Unicode string, causing code to blow up later in the templating layer; on Python 3, it works perfectly).
released and yet unreleased at the same time by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 19:48 · Score: 0

alpha, released and yet unreleased at the same time
Probabilistic distro by hamvil · 2013-04-23 19:59 · Score: 5, Funny

You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
1. Re:Probabilistic distro by theVarangian · 2013-04-23 21:14 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
  It's more like:
  
  If the display on your Fedora19 box is in sleep mode and you know that the Fedora 19 kernel panics once a day because of a poorly written kernel module you cannot know whether it OS has panicked until you wake the display. Until then all you can do is calculate the probability that the kernel has panicked as the sleep time of the display approaches 24 hours. Thus your Fedora 19 box is both in a state of kernel panic and running normally at the same time until you wake the display and 'fix its state'. The interesting thing is what happens if you try to cheat by pinging your Fedora 19 box from your laptop. Assuming you have a perfect network connection you can only tell whether the system is up or not, you cannot tell whether it's lack of response is due to a kernel panic or a segfault in the network daemon. You can only calculate the probability of the lack of response being due to a panic since, on your badly broken Fedora 19 box, panics happen more frequently than segfaults in inetd do. So you get closer to inferring the state of your Fedora 19 box but you cannot be entirely sure by simply pinging it, you need more information but not so much that you fix the state.
2. Re:Probabilistic distro by trooper9 · 2013-04-23 23:49 · Score: 2
  
  That was awesome. But not until I read it.
  
  --
  blah
3. Re:Probabilistic distro by theVarangian · 2013-04-23 23:56 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  That was awesome. But not until I read it.
  Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.
4. Re:Probabilistic distro by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 05:54 · Score: 0
  
  Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.
  Just like your mom last night.
5. Re:Probabilistic distro by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 09:14 · Score: 0
  
  Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.
  Just like your mom last night.
  So now we know what you fantasise about... not that we wanted to know, buuuut.... now we know. Happy?
Good Name by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 20:02 · Score: 1

Does that mean that it will be both good and shit at the same time?
Installer? by Dadoo · 2013-04-23 20:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

Did they fix the installer? Once I got it installed, Fedora 18 (with KDE) is pretty good, but the installation was a bitch. The installer choked on my hard drive, because it was already partitioned. I had to get to the shell and delete the partitions manually to get it to work.

--
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
1. Re:Installer? by kthreadd · 2013-04-23 22:17 · Score: 2
  
  I just tried the DVD. Not great but felt slightly better than 18, until I had to set the root password and realized that it didn't detect the keyboard.
2. Re:Installer? by DrXym · 2013-04-23 23:12 · Score: 1
  
  The Fedora 18 installer was pretty bad. It was like a dialog mated and a NeXT style shelf and created an unholy abomination. I hope with the time pressures gone, that they've fixed it. A lot of the confusion would be avoided if it worked like a wizard - i.e. a Next button at the bottom of each task and the final dialog that says Start Install. But the shelf could still remain so people who want to pick and choose what things to do could do so via that method. And also throw in some feedback to the user rather than "mystery time" where for 10-20 seconds after certain actions like disk formatting, the GUI would just sit there without yielding a clue as to what it was doing or what options were valid.
  Red Hat also need to line up the people responsible for their Software Update and Add / Remove Programs tool and shoot one of them to motivate the others to create a UI which actually makes sense. Both are really untuitive and unhelpful. e.g. Software Update bounces its progress list around like it is possessed, and uses some really inscrutable generic icons for status.
3. Re:Installer? by tehcyder · 2013-04-24 02:32 · Score: 2
  
  I just tried the DVD. Not great but felt slightly better than 18, until I had to set the root password and realized that it didn't detect the keyboard.
  No problem, everyone just leaves the root password blank anyway.
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Installer a little better than F18's by rklrkl · 2013-04-23 21:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!
The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.
1. Re:Installer a little better than F18's by Karrde712 · 2013-04-24 00:01 · Score: 2
  
  That's actually only partially true. Fedora 18 didn't include MATE as an option while doing a DVD install, but if you changed the package location in Anaconda to "closest mirror", you would suddenly get a much larger set of available desktops, including Cinnamon, MATE and others. The reason for this should be obvious: there's only so much space on a DVD, so we tend to keep the set of packages on it limited to the most popular set. Which at the time of Fedora 18's release did *not* include Cinnamon or MATE.
  We're definitely accepting criticism for how we can clean up the interface and make important options more visible. That's very nearly the whole point of the Alpha release. Please file bugs at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ against the "anaconda" component of the Fedora project.
  
  --
  You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
2. Re:Installer a little better than F18's by AdamWill · 2013-04-24 06:31 · Score: 1
  
  "Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!"
  Why is "package version numbers" a 'blatantly obvious requirement'? What actual use is it? If anything it's debugging info, and it is stored in the appropriate logs. Just because you're used to seeing it doesn't mean that seeing it is of any practical use.
  Install time remaining is not practically possible to determine reliably. It's a classic progress bar problem. We don't know how long the installation of each of the remaining packages is going to take. If we printed it we'd just be guessing.
  "The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!)"
  Capitalization is not inevitably shouty. That applies to written communication. It does not necessarily apply to user interfaces.
  "It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen)"
  Why is this nasty? If a partition is 20MB big you probably want to see '20 MB', not '0.02 GB', but if it's 500GB big, you want to see '500 GB', not '500000 MB'. You can enter sizes in any common format in custom partitioning, it understands them all.
  "and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me."
  we could probably write this down somewhere, but just specify any size that's bigger than what's remaining, and it'll be rounded down to all remaining space.
State of the cat? by judhaz · 2013-04-23 21:35 · Score: 2

Q: Is Fedora dead? A: Yes and no.
1. Re:State of the cat? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 02:02 · Score: 0
  
  Fedora is VERY easily in the top 5 of Linux distros. Not to mention it's the Redhat sponsored community development project for RHEL, with Redhat being the #1 Linux vendor. You might not like Fedora because you don't understand it's role, but it is VERY much alive, and is not going anywhere.
  You're no different from the tards who think that because they don't like the direction that Gnome 3 went, that it's a failure. Well guess what, plenty of people use it, and like it BETTER than Gnome 2, they're just not as obnoxious as the whiney minority.
2. Re:State of the cat? by judhaz · 2013-04-24 04:21 · Score: 1
  
  I was actually trying to do a cat analogy. Schödinger's cat actually, (re)tard or not. FWIW, I am a long time Fedora user, but have never bothered with GNOME 2 or 3 or MATE, since I like KDE. I am hoping for some more KDE love from the core Fedora team, although Rex Dieter is doing a great job.
3. Re:State of the cat? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 04:22 · Score: 0
  
  I couldn't tell if this was a WHOOSH or an insightful comment until I read it. Unfortunately, it resolved as the former.
MariaBD by clemdoc · 2013-04-23 22:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

MariaBD will replace MySQL
After wikipedia (on *. yesterday) and of course my revered Slackware, MariaDB really seems to be getting traction.
Maybe time to have a look...
Re:sdfsdfs by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 22:56 · Score: 0

Probably your best post so far.
an idea... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-23 23:55 · Score: 0

How 'bout they take a break and fix some things first in F18:
1. Left mouse button mystery. Sometimes it simply just stops working. Apparently this has been noted in several releases.
I think it's related to enabling arrow-key-can-move-mouse functionality since I've never seen the issue prior to enabling that feature.
I've seen it affect the right and sometimes both buttons. Many have said rebooting is the only solution, but I've found that pressing
keys on the numeric keypad will restore it. But there seems no defined sequence to do this, just luck?
2. How bout we get somebody who actually understands how LVMs work so that we can have LUKs + LVM working again at/during boot
time like it used to work in Fedora 12 (my last version before I up'd to 18).
3. The current installer {software} must die. It can't be fixed. Time to cut our loses.
4. I use xv. After the last round of updates, xv can no longer perform a screen/window grab - gets a empty 2-bit image. This is insane.
5. PulseAudio. Why does it click/pop/distort the sound every time a window opens or some other graphics operation takes place.
6. KDE. Somehow in the last updates, the task bar has been added to the "fade-in" group of windows instead of sliding up into position
like it used to. Minor, but really annoying.
7. gnome-terminal resizing itself down to nothing. Yes, I know there are hacks and other terminal apps, but I actually use some of the
unique gnome-terminal features.
I think we're seeing the {rotten} fruit of this rapid release cycle that has been adopted several years ago. Each release seems to go
1 step forward, and 1.5 steps backwards.
Honestly, I think the real problem is {lack of} regression testing and poor management and peer review. There are definitely talented people
working, but they all seem like mavericks.
CAPTCHA = odorous - Hey /., it isn't that bad!
1. Re:an idea... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 06:42 · Score: 0
  
  5. PulseAudio. Why does it click/pop/distort the sound every time a window opens or some other graphics operation takes place.
  I've had a problem with numerous distros running pulseaudio where the audio clicks repeatedly. It's being caused by the auto-mute function as it continually tries to switch back and forth between headphones and speaker output.
  A (temporary) fix for me was to disable auto-mute in alsamixer, or by preventing the erroneous detection of a new output by commenting out
  
  #load-module module-switch-on-port-available
  
  in
  
  /etc/pulse/default.pa
  
  this problem makes any audio too obnoxious to even try to listen to
2. Re:an idea... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 06:48 · Score: 0
  
  You're using Fedora. It's essentially an extended beta-test for RHEL. It is meant to be "bleeding edge".
  Expect bugs. Lots of them. File bug reports instead of bitching. Alternately, use a different distro. It is truly incredible how dumb you sound.
3. Re:an idea... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 21:30 · Score: 0
  
  Wow! Thank you.
FP? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 00:30 · Score: 0

First post?
Window Manager / Desktop Environment by jon3k · 2013-04-24 02:50 · Score: 1

I'll just keep using dwm like I always have. If you've never used a tiling window manager, check it out. You'll never be able to go back to manually managing the size and location of windows after you use it.
Schrödinger's Distro by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-24 04:16 · Score: 0

Without installing it, is it still the worst distro ever?
feature list by synapse7 · 2013-04-24 05:55 · Score: 1

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/19/FeatureList