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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.'"
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*
I think its just cranky old sysadmins that don't like systemd. Its actually quite good and offers several benefits over the old sysvinit.
It's the cranky old sysadmins who keep the servers and internet running. What they say is often important. When someone tries to re-invent Windows Services, AIX smit and Windows Event log, they may grump, but they do so with the experience saying that it wasn't a good idea the last time either.
The problem is that many aren't "cranky old SA's" but just uninformed old gits that refuses to even read up on new technology and flat out denies that there any problems whatsoever with Linux logfiles, and the way Linux handles services (init etc).
Whenever I see systemd or Journal hate here on Slashdot, it is always just snarky remarks that almost always are totally wrong, and clearly demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about.
Even if you never, ever use the Journal tools or access the Journal log files, systemd and Journal will enhance the Syslog files considerably, by enabling log info early in the boot process, and tagging and aggregate the logfiles.
IMHO, systemd and Journal is the best new tools for the Linux SA made in the past decade.
I really recommend reading this list of systemd myths:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
And Lennart's "systemd for Administrators". Here is a link to the first part of twenty instalments:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html
Very good stuff. A must read for any Linux SA, whether they think they dislike systemd or not.