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Fedora 19 Beta Released: Alive, Dead, or Neither?
darthcamaro writes "Fedora 19, aka Schrödinger's Cat, is now out in Beta. There is a long list of new features in this release, including 3D modelling tools, improved security, federated VoIP, updated GNOME and KDE desktops and new improved virtual storage to name a few. '"Normally we have a good batch of features for everyone in a new release and this time around a lot of it is under the hood kinds of stuff," Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron, told ServerWatch.'"
systemd is pretty much here to stay, I'm betting that in about two years every major distro will use it. No, I don't think that is a good thing.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You know, with all the crap with GNOME 3 and all, I left Fedora for CentOS. In many ways, CentOS serves me better, but in that, I also learned there were some things I couldn't do. Not "couldn't do without a great deal of trouble" but couldn't do. GiMP was and still is to some degree, important to me recreationally and professionally. And while I certainly have issues with GiMP 2.8.x's directions, I wanted to run it. Turned out, however, that I couldn't. It seems conflicting versions of GTK for the Desktop UI and the requirements of 2.8.x created a bit of an impossible situation. Determined to make it work, I eventually did manual compiles of GiMP and all of the GTK related dependencies. And there were a lot of them. But even after that, GiMP, with its own GTK libraries, would not integrate with my existing GNOME desktop. So I lost Japanese text entry which is, at times for me, important.
GTK is "Gimp toolkit." This makes it an application library. But for some reason, GNOME, the desktop OS shell, decided to adopt GTK for what it does. It didn't seem like a bad idea until you take into account that the GiMP and GTK developers don't give a rat's ass about backward compatibility or any of that. It is GNOME's fault for selecting GTK instead of forking it or something else. So now, among other programs, I cannot run GiMP on CentOS. I will never stop ranting about this.
But I miss the good days and have been watching the MATE desktop which will never, it seems, come to CentOS. And so I've been tempted to give the next Fedora a try. One thing I haven't heard much about is wobbly windows. I really like having my wobbly windows and 3D virtual desktop. (I speak of Compiz, of course if you didn't already know.) I see this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MATE-Compiz_Spin and that's encouraging... but I wonder. I hope anyway.
But I was looking at the release schedule. Combine that with the doom of the global economy, I'm thinking I'd be better off buying up stocks of canned beans instead of a new hard drive. *sigh*
Even for a supposedly bleeding edge distro SystemD was included in Fedora in far too immature a state with too many broken/missing features, IMHO, and that gave it a bad rep. The latest SystemD release in Fedora 19 actually isn't that bad if you give it a chance and take the time to properly grok how it works, it's more complex that the old init script approach, but it's also much more powerful. You pays your money...
Anyway, complaining about SystemD is *sooo* last distro now. The cool kids are moaning about the half-assed and feature-very-much-incomplete FirewallD (from essentially the same people that brought you SystemD) now which seems to be the suffering from the same "included a few 0.x revisions too soon" problems.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
But systemd is still a killer, and not in a good way. If this makes it into RHEL 7, it will be a sad wake-up-call for Red Hat when the paying user base stays at 6 or migrates to competitors.
I agree that systemd is very bad, but even worse is journald which replaces traditional syslog with a binary logging format. (Even worse is that the binary format is *by design* not stable and you can only read a log file with the same version of the tool that created the log file!)
Unfortunately, OpenSUSE is on the systemd/journald bandwagon now too. :-(
systems with poor GPUs probably have poor CPUs as well, so LLVM pipe is not going to be fun.
You don't have to go back to far to find GPUs with max textures size of 2048x2048 or lower. for a composited desktop across multiple desktops the total desktop size cant exceed the max texture size. So on a few year old netbook you may not be able plug into to an external monitor or projector with GNOME3 where you could with GNOME2.
i booted fedora18 in a kvm virtual machine today. The GNOME3 desktop displayed, but with horrible corruption.
I'll take their advice seriously, when they seriously contribute an actual technical criticism of systemd that doesn't simply end up as a platitude or rule of thumb.
I Mean, Einstein himself was a critic/non believer of Quantum Mechanics, I wouldn't call him an idiot, but you can't let people who've been doing the same thing well forever just squash a new idea without valid criticism.
Familiarity
Consistency
Menus
Obviousness
.
Honest question here, not trolling. Doesn't your last point negate your first? If it's obvious then who cares about "familiar"? To me "familiar" is what's killing the industry from making any major progress. It's already proven that people will accept new (via iOS and Android) if it's easy enough to use.
I spent the last 10 minutes googling to try to find out what all the hate is for SystemD (and what it is). Here is what I've found, according to "the web":
* SystemD gives flexibility about when and how services are started in a way that old init scripts could not
* Its currently a bit rough around the edges
* It can significantly lower boot time in the real world
Chief complaints seem to be
* "its not unix-y"
* Its new, and a bit complex
* If its screwed up, the system may not boot (then again, ditto with init scripts / fstab / grub.cfg / initrd / any of a zillion other things)
* People dont like the developer
Is that an accurate summary? Are there any technical issues that Im not getting? It just seems to be a lot of vitriol amounting to "I dont like learning new systems" (which, honestly, is a valid criticism-- but its not a technical deficiency).