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Fedora 19 Alpha Released
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."
You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
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.
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.
No one offers GNOME 2 because it's effectively dead. MATE is the replacement.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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?
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.