Fedora 19 Released

hypnosec writes "The Fedora Project has officially announced the release of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' today. New features for the open source distribution include the developer's assistant, which accelerates development efforts by providing templates, samples and toolchains for a different languages; OpenShift Origin, which allows easy building of Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; node.js; Ruby 2.0.0; MariaDB; Checkpoint & Restore, which allows users to checkpoint and restore processes; and OpenLMI, which makes remote management of machines simpler. The distribution also packs GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspace 4.10 and MATE Desktop 1.6."

Comments

'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Damn. Now I'll never know if my system is up or down w/o opening the case.

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[dgatwood]

They say it was released, but I won't believe it until I see it. And incidentally, does the OS release kill the cat just as well as a particle?

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[fahrbot-bot]

And incidentally, does the OS release kill the cat just as well as a particle?

You're safe as long as you don't run: rpm install "hydrocyanic-acid"

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You missunderstand the concept. With Fedora, it's not "don't know if it's up or down", it's "who gives a flying fuck, it's fedora, not a production system"...

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[purpledinoz]

Just don't look. It will be up and down at the same time.

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Just don't look. It will be up and down at the same time.

Didn't think of that, but it's going to be a bitch for my availability stats.
[ Now I'll have to get a degree in quantum mechanics to re-write "uptime" ... sigh. ]

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[AdamWill]

Well, my own cat made it through the release validation process unscathed, but the Project takes no responsibility for the health of anyone else's cats...

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[sconeu]

You sound rather uncertain about that.

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Schrödinger's Cat in the red Fedora?

Will curiousity kill the cat?

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[ozmanjusri]

And incidentally, does the OS release kill the cat just as well as a particle?

Well, correlation ain't causation, but I haven't seen any pussy since I started using it.

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is still safe after that command, the operator, the cat or the system ?

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen any pussy before you started using it?

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

curiosity@fedora# kill -9 cat

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[davester666]

As long as half of all cat's everywhere die...and I don't care which half, front or back, left or right, top or bottom...

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[ozmanjusri]

Yes...

Re:'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[RabidReindeer]

Who is still safe after that command, the operator, the cat or the system ?

It comes with Gnome 3. The cat lives, safe in the box. Everyone outside the box dies.

And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the deb package format, and apt is much better than the rubbish that Fedora and RedHat uses...

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this true? One could think that at this point they would have gotten something as basic as a package management (rpm & yum) to work correctly. I have done a couple of basic Fedora installations and the package management has mostly worked fine.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[maden]

Thank you for your very lengthy and detailed comparison of Ubuntu and Debian VS Fedora, it has enlightened us in countless ways! I think we can hereby declare Ubuntu and Debian as superior to Fedora, at once. Case closed!

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[bill_mcgonigle]

They're both fine. What's more surprising to me is that both of them have completely missed the functionality that puppet, cfengine, et. al. provide.

It used to be that distros would adopt and integrate such functionality. So many of the Fedora 'spins' could simply be expressed as a puppet script. Having a well-supported "make me a mailserver" etc. would be great too.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

No, it isn't true. Package formats are simple things, indeed. It's really just a tarball with some metadata.

What is still arguably true is that Debian has a wider range of packages than just about any other distro, and Debian also has extremely stringent policies about ensuring upgrade paths and avoiding dependency problems and the like. If you run one of the more stable incarnations of Debian and don't cheat by using external repositories or grabbing packages before they make it through the testing process, you will probably experience fewer packaging problems than on virtually any other distro. But this has nothing at all to do with the package *format*, very little to do with the packaging *tools*, and everything to do with the *package maintenance process*. If Debian used RPM, that would still hold true; if Fedora used .deb, it would still hold true.

Years and years and years ago it was true that RPM-based distros did not have dependency solving package managers with all the capabilities of apt. They do now, and have done for many years. But no community RPM-based distro has packaging policies as robust as the ones applied against the stable branches of Debian (RHEL's are very similar, though, within the same constraints - stick with the official RHEL repos and update channels, no cheating), so they still tend to have a few more cases where a maintainer makes a mistake with a dependency in an update or whatever, and this has led to the eternal life of the 'RPM is inferior to deb' meme, when that's not actually the issue at all.

It would not make sense for a distro like Fedora to be as stringent with packaging policies as stable Debian is, simply because of the differing goals and timeframes involved. But we have been working to make things better, consistently, and the rate of occurrence of packaging errors in modern Fedora is I think significantly lower than it used to be, especially if you don't use the 'updates-testing' repository where updates are validated before being sent to the stable 'updates' repository. (Though we much appreciate it if you *do* enable updates-testing on a testbed machine, and help us to test the updates and catch errors in them before they go to the stable updates repository).

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Ubuntu that would be

$ sudo apt-get install mail-server^

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[unrtst]

Personally, I've found yum to be much much slower than apt under normal/default usage.
However, rpm has been MUCH MUCH easier to use than dpkg and it runs quite well. I LOVE the syntax of rpm. I also love apt and its syntax for what it does. If those two could get married, I'd be very happy.

Another one that's pretty darn awesome is emerge. I feel like they got it right almost all around, except that it wasn't made with binary packages in mind, so that part isn't as elegant (IMO).

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[robmv]

Give me debdelta and we can talk. Everyone say apt is faster that yum, but until deb based distributions give me the equivalent of deltarpm as an stable feature, yum will always be faster for me on my awful internet connection that apt

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

The 'real' difference between apt and yum is not as large as it seems, because apt 'cheats' - it has a cron job to download metadata in the background. yum refreshes its metadata only when you run a yum command, so if you don't run them very often, every time you do, you have to wait through a metadata refresh. That's usually what people are complaining about when they complain about yum being slow.

Having said that, even after accounting for that factor, yum's performance could stand improvement, and in fact we're working on that. The package manager currently called 'DNF' is really 'the next major version of yum' being developed in a sort of stealth mode. yum itself is in maintenance-only mode, and all new work is being done on DNF. Once it's mature enough, it will become The New Yum in a future Fedora release. If you're impatient, you can install dnf on Fedora 18 or Fedora 19 and use it instead of yum, with most of the same syntax. It has not yet reached feature parity with yum - including some significant features like 'yum history' - but what it does, it does noticeably faster than yum does it.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

Funnily enough, on Fedora:

yum groupinstall mail-server

Puppet is really for *site-specific* configuration stuff, in my way of looking at things.

And no, Fedora spins could not simply be expressed as puppet scripts, unfortunately. We are considering various proposals for updating how Fedora images are generated (the current system for building live images is pretty hideous behind the scenes), some of which incorporate the use of something like puppet, but something like puppet in itself is not sufficient infrastructure for generating operating system images, it requires rather more bits.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[eric_herm]

To be honest, you need more than just a puppet recipe to make a mail server. There is several how to because everybody has a different view on what to use. Dovecot, cyrus, ldap/mysql/simple user, postfix/exim/sendmail, what spam filtering, how, etc, etc. People are asking what module they should use to do this or that, and everybody is replicating module because the current one do not work like they want. So the issue is not solved, it just moved elsewhere.

The live spin are made using kickstart. So someone could already use that to replicate the setup, and there was some proposal to use ansible on the fedora-devel ist, not sure how far this went.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, apt is so much faster than yum, it doesn't need delta packages!

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

It speeds up network connections? Where can I get this magical software?!

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.debian.org/distrib/

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[thetoastman]

I haven't looked at this yet, but it seems Redhat has their own spin on things:

http://spacewalk.redhat.com/

It doesn't look as flexible or powerful as puppet, cfengine, etc., but it looks like a start at least.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dovecot, cyrus, ldap/mysql/simple user, postfix/exim/sendmail, what spam filtering, how, etc, etc.

In the medium business world the answer is frequently all of the above and then some !!

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[srobert]

Can we mod him up because he used the adverb, "funnily".

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[bill_mcgonigle]

There is several how to because everybody has a different view on what to use

There doesn't need to be a single solution for any of these, but having all the setup be manual doesn't help most users. That's why we went with deb/rpm in the first place.

As far as the choices - all of my clients just tell me "make me a mailserver". They don't choose the specs, they tell me the requirements and I choose the specs. Frankly most people don't care why underlies their tools, for better or worse. Of the hundreds or thousands of packages I use, I can say I've only studied the .specs of dozens of them, so at a certain level apparently I don't care either.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[walshy007]

It would not make sense for a distro like Fedora to be as stringent with packaging policies as stable Debian is,

Have you packaged something for fedora before? It's packaging policies are quite stringent.

Here's a portion of it

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't integrated into apt but debdelta exists and is used daily:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/debdelta

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

Spacewalk (which is the 'upstream' version of RH's Satellite, btw) and puppet aren't exactly intended to do the same things, AFAIK. Google has some useful results, inc. http://www.brightprocess.com/?p=306 and http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085138.html . I'm no expert on the field (I'm much more down at the duct tape end) but it looks like people actually tend to use both together.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cron job only downloads data if you enable that.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

Yes. I work on Fedora. For Red Hat. I've done seven package builds in the last week - https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/userinfo?userID=954 . I'm still official maintainer for a few. I contributed to several rounds of discussion on revising the packaging guidelines. And I'm the team lead for the RH team which works on the automated testing system which is ultimately intended to *enforce* some of the packaging guidelines. Credentials enough for you?

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[UltraZelda64]

The only thing I could imagine not being as good in Fedora compared to Debian is the repositories themselves. Debian has a hell of a lot of packages, it's hard to compete with. Unless you consider "non-free" stuff that Debian doesn't include by default. But the package management system and package format? Come on, seriously, by now they both work fine. The main thing that matters is what package management tools you like best, and that is nothing more than a personal preference.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they are not both "fine". The fact is that the debian package management is utter rubbish.

I've lost count on the number of times I've had the package database corrupted beyond repair for some reason (power-out, disk full, whatever), something which has yet to happen to any rpm-based distribution I'm using. Yes, I've had the rpm-database damaged too, but not to the extent it couldn't repair itself.

The biggest problem with Fedora is yum which is just as much garbage as the debian package management. I wish the Fedora people should just take it out through the back-door and shoot it. There isn't a single reason to use it over zypper other than NIH.

The bottom line is though that I'm done with Debian. It's way to unreliable, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Adam, why don't you just bury yum, stop that NIH thing and go for zypper? It's much faster and AFAICT there is nothing wrong with it.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[CronoCloud]

But we have been working to make things better, consistently, and the rate of occurrence of packaging errors in modern Fedora is I think significantly lower than it used to be, especially if you don't use the 'updates-testing' repository where updates are validated before being sent to the stable 'updates' repository.

I've been running Fedora since F12 and there are fewer packaging errors, and problems are usually fixed within a day.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[CronoCloud]

Oh? didn't know about DNF...

(sudo yum install dnf)

hmm doesn't seem that much faster than yum to me... though yum always worked fairly quickly, for me anyway at least more recently it has. So not that large of a performance jump for me...not yet... it is slightly faster, I agree on that.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[AdamWill]

One of the points of dnf is that it will share a dependency solving backend with zypper (libsolv), that was an intentional and co-ordinated decision to reduce NIH. We can't really just use each other's tools wholesale, though, there are various bits of unique functionality each needs to maintain, AIUI.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[walshy007]

Sorry for probably coming off as belittling, it was not intended in that manner. It just came across as you were saying fedoras standards were lax, which as a testament to the work you and others are doing I would say they are most definitely not.

Overall I've been very pleased with koji/mock/etc and the level of quality control present.

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you run one of the more stable incarnations of Debian and don't cheat by using external repositories or grabbing packages before they make it through the testing process, you will probably experience the limitations of using ancient software.

FTFY

Re:And it's still not as good as Ubuntu or Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I've found yum to be much much slower than apt under normal/default usage.
However, rpm has been MUCH MUCH easier to use than dpkg and it runs quite well. I LOVE the syntax of rpm. I also love apt and its syntax for what it does. If those two could get married, I'd be very happy.

Another one that's pretty darn awesome is emerge. I feel like they got it right almost all around, except that it wasn't made with binary packages in mind, so that part isn't as elegant (IMO).

yeah as long as you dont mind rpm hell

Schrödinger's Cat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to click the link; I don't want to risk killing it.
I'm better off not knowing.

Re:Schrödinger's Cat

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I suspect God already killed that kitten...

Who will get it first?

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS or Scientific Linux? Or the dark horse, Oracle Unbreakable Linux?

Re:Who will get it first?

[Junta]

None of the above, since they don't track Fedora before RedHat does?

Re:Who will get it first?

[Anonymous Coward]

None, all of the three freeloaders you mention just rip off Red Hat Enterprise Linux (legally, but still). They won't do nothing until Red Hat produces the bits, which is scheduled for the fall and that will be based primarily on Fedora 18.

Re:Who will get it first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Fedora 18 was a disaster of epic proportions.

Testing the character parsing of every web site...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Schrödinger's Cat

Thus testing the character parsing and storage of half the blog sites left on the Internet. (With an apostrophe and an umlaut.)

Oracle's copy

[Anonymous Coward]

It occurs to me to wonder about Oracle copying Red Hat's work and releasing it as a different distribution. The particular thing I'm wondering about is MariaDB, now part of Fedora, while Oracle is supporting MySQL. Eventually the two projects will go separate ways, and then what will Oracle do?

Re:Oracle's copy

[crutchy]

MariaDB will lead the way merely because Oracle smells like Schrodinger's cat piss to open source types.
I'm also not sure if Oracle is "supporting" MySQL (milking it may be more the case).

what will Oracle do?

Probably look for some other project to buy off in it's early stages that is set to take over the world.

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place, but I guess if you own the trademark you own the software.

I wish MariaDB well. I'm yet to convert (I'm still stuck in the old PHP mysql_connect function call mentality), but I will hopefully eventually get with the times.

Re:Oracle's copy

[AdamWill]

Oracle doesn't have a copy of Fedora, so I don't really see how the question is relevant to this thread.

Re:Oracle's copy

[_merlin]

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place, but I guess if you own the trademark you own the software.

Sigh... How many times will this need to be explained? All MySQL code was always Copyright MySQL AB. External contributions to the project required copyright assignment to MySQL AB (just like contributions to GNU projects require copyright assignment to FSF). Sun Microsystems bought the copyright to MySQL, and Oracle bought Sun. The copyright holder can release their IP under any license they want. They cannot revoke the GPL (or other copyleft) license on anything already released under that license. You don't lose your rights to anything MySQL AB and/or Sun Microsystems already released under GPL. But you have no right to demand that the copyright owner release future versions under any particular license.

Re:Oracle's copy

[jbolden]

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place

MySQL Inc owned the copyright to the MySQL database, every line of code. Their business model was to give away a GPL version and sell a commercial version.
Sun bought MySQL when Oracle began to move towards Linux and break somewhat with Solaris / Sun as their primary system.
Oracle bought Sun and thus owns copyright to the MySQL code.

Re:Oracle's copy

[kthreadd]

So as long as Oracle doesn't buy GNU we're fine, right?

Re:Oracle's copy

[_merlin]

As much as I dislike RMS, I don't think he's a sellout. I very much doubt the FSF would ever sell the GNU copyrights to an organisation that doesn't have similar ideals.

Re:Oracle's copy

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I dislike RMS, I don't think he's a sellout. I very much doubt the FSF would ever sell the GNU copyrights to an organisation that doesn't have similar ideals.

I think that RMS will sell out a week after Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers give away everything they ever owned to the poor, announce that they've made a terrible mistake, that Karl Marx was right all along and beg forgiveness from the world.

Re:Oracle's copy

[unixisc]

Question: for OEL, does Oracle take every version of RHEL that comes out and rebrand it, or did they take one particular version, rebrand and then fork it?

Re:Oracle's copy

[AdamWill]

I'm no expert in the field (I've never run RHEL or OEL) but from what I understand, they clone each RHEL release, then provide it with a choice of a kernel that matches the RHEL kernel or Oracle's own kernel that has some stuff they think is good in it.

Re:Oracle's copy

[crutchy]

he's too busy chowing down on toenails

Get it! It's really good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay away from it! It's really bad

Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Jim Hall]

I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.

Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.

I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.

The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.

So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.

Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example and instructions). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3.x is quite good these days, except one needs to install the extension to get sane ALT-TAB behavior.
These days I prefer Gnome 3.x over anything else.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Dcnjoe60]

Based on your post, it sounds like Xfce doesn't fit your needs either. Otherwise, why try and make it look and act like a Chromebook?

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[sconeu]

This release has the foot (they still use a foot, right?) bringing up a screenful of tiled shit that behaves like a touchscreen.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Savage-Rabbit]

Gnome 3.x is quite good these days, except one needs to install the extension to get sane ALT-TAB behavior.
These days I prefer Gnome 3.x over anything else.

Ditto, I also install the 'Click Fix' extension that allows you to start a new window by clicking on it in the activity bar instead the default behaviour of bringing the last used window into focus. I also had to fire up tweak tool (or was it dconf-editor?) to enable logging off. It's amazing how much drama some people have managed to conjure up over Gnome 3. Those who don't like it don't have to use it.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

Well, File menus frequently don't let you do operations on files either. *Firefox* has a 'File' menu. Which has "Work Offline" and "Quit" on it. How are those actions on Files, exactly?

The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it, but for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in the process of being revised to meet new design guidelines. This process is not complete yet; until it is, you'll see inconsistencies between apps which have been fully converted, apps which have not yet been fully converted, and apps which haven't been converted at all.

See https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/HIG/ApplicationMenus for the guidelines on using application menus (the menu in the top panel).

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought point of the extension framework was to enhance gnome-shell, rather than replace all the functionality stripped out of it with each incarnation. There is something fundamentally wrong with the UI if you have to load extensions, use a "tweak" tool, or dink with the "dconf" settings just to get your DE back to the level of usefulness it had before the Gnome devs decided they know more than you do on how you should use your computer.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

The fact you are using a desktop environment written by someone else instead of writing your own is a statement that you think someone else knows more than you do on how you should use your computer.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Jim Hall]

The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it

No, but I can only comment on the state of things today.

[...] for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in the process of being revised to meet new design guidelines. This process is not complete yet; until it is, you'll see inconsistencies between apps which have been fully converted, apps which have not yet been fully converted, and apps which haven't been converted at all.

(emphasis mine)

And I look forward to trying GNOME again when things are more consistent between all the applications. Until then, I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

yum install gnome-classic-session

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[RedHackTea]

Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first... After using Fedora 19 (Beta) for the past few weeks now, I can tell you that GNOME 3.8 has fixed most (if not all) of the stability issues that I used to encounter in Fedora 18. It runs smoother and faster for me. However, the dreaded "tracker" program and the initial installer are still bitches. Fedora fixed the Add and Update Software applications, but now GNOME has broken the Printer application (if use it on a LAN, it will present you with an authorization popup repeatedly for every computer). But internally, I am happier with hostnamectl and SELinux now; Fedora has appeared to fix some of the annoying issues in Fedora 18 at least. Lastly, I suggest LXDE over Xfce :D

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect (Are you a Gnome dev? Because this is the sort of shit that's dragging Gnome down).

All it shows is someone else knows how to program better. Not how to use it better as you seem to think.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

"I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently."

(emphasis mine)

You implied very clearly that you did not know why this was the case, and that it was some kind of intentional thing. You *do* know why it's the case, because it has previously been explained to you, and you know that it is not the intended state of affairs but merely an artifact of a long-term transition in design, yet you continue to criticize it as if it were the former rather than the latter.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

He might as well be. He's a Red Hat guy.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adamwill

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

No, I'm not a GNOME dev, just someone who can think straight.

The largest possible set of configuration options for a desktop environment is only possibly accessible by writing one yourself. Imagine a desktop environment with a checkbox for absolutely every possible choice about how a DE could work. What you have just imagined is not KDE (though it's close!), but a very unwieldy programming language.

If you really want 'ultimate choice' you need an option to render the entire desktop upside down, or in inverted colours, or projected onto a sphere, or as if it were a colony of monkeys. All of these are possible configurations of a desktop environment.

When you choose to use someone else's code rather than write your own, you are *inevitably* excluding a very large set of possibilities for how that code could in fact work. The simple act of choosing to use someone else's code is *in itself* a statement that you *want that person to make a large number of choices for you*.

Once that fact is established, then in deciding exactly how many configuration options the resultant code should have we are only bickering about where to draw a line between 'choices made by the author' and 'choices left up to the user'. We are not arguing about some sort of serious principle of personal liberty.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

What does that have to do with anything? Red Hat pays several people who work on KDE. I don't work on GNOME, I work on Fedora.

Re: Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out MATE 1.6 in Fedora 19. It is effectively a fork of gnome 2. It may be very traditional and old fashioned but it sure is functional. Even still works well with compiz.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Red Hat hire anyone that isn't an asshole?

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a flack, Adam. You're paid to be here, to market the brand by pushing the 'positives' and spinning the negatives.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

When you choose to use someone else's code rather than write your own, you are *inevitably* excluding a very large set of possibilities for how that code could in fact work. The simple act of choosing to use someone else's code is *in itself* a statement that you *want that person to make a large number of choices for you*.

Well put. This is precisely why I left Windows for Linux. And also precisely why I don't use the distribution you work on anymore.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good fodder for the comment sections of future Gnome posts. It's going to be fun quoting this material as yet another example of the arrogance that permeates the Gnome developer culture. Personally, I didn't think anyone could do better than WJM in that regard, but I think you've pulled it off. Congrats!

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[dbIII]

and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability

While you and I may think gnome 3 sucks dogs balls some of the people using it are noting how happy their dog is :)

The common desktop idea didn't catch on because some people are more productive with what others think is weird (eg. xmonad) or just like something that others view with revulsion on sight (Win8 Metro).

Personally I like MATE better, but don't use it since it does weird stuff with VLC (can't see the drop down menus). I'd heard enlightenment 17 was going to be a standard package in fedora19, but if not the pre-2000 version e16 with a decade worth of bug fixes is still better than a lot of desktop environments.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[dbIII]

Imagine a desktop environment with a checkbox for absolutely every possible choice about how a DE could work

Now you know why enlightenment 17 took so long!

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[StuartHankins]

I second your views on Xfce. I can put someone in front of it and they don't need UI training. Things just work as expected.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[StuartHankins]

To play Devil's Advocate, choosing a DE makes no statement about the capabilities of the designer. My company chooses to pay me for other work I do that results in profits, and pay Red Hat for the support for DE's. I've been coding a very long time, and if I thought that coding my own DE and supporting it forevermore was the way to go, I would do it.

And while I know you work on Fedora and aren't personally responsible for all RHEL / Fedora issues, you need to understand that some of us are your RHEL / RHEV customers. When we're talking about silly things not working -- such as the System Monitor in Fedora and RHEL not showing all 16 cores (it's way too wide for the screen and can't be made narrower), which should have been vetted in Fedora before shipping in RHEL -- we can become frustrated. We were told by Red Hat that Activity Monitor was broken and they were aware of the issue, and we should use KSysGuard with all its KDE dependencies instead. The point is, sometimes a usable value isn't set as default, and common configurations don't work as expected. That's GNOME 3. The key to using a system is to provide reliable features with little surprise and even less irritation wherever possible. When you're buying expensive licenses you expect the built-in tools to work as expected, barring inevitable bugs. When a bug is brought up through the normal support channels and after an unsatisfactory support response you include your VAR, assigned Red Hat sales staff, as well as Red Hat technical support, you expect real answers.

GUI KVM settings don't save if you use the command-line kvm tools? Well then, don't use the GUI, we were told. It will be fixed soon.

Windows 2008 R2 timing settings result in CPU spikes on Nehalem, while idling, under RHEV 3? *No one* at Red Hat support -- and I had more than 4 reps involved with that one over a couple of months -- could solve it. I solved it and reported the solution so it could be incorporated into a bugfix.

And don't get me started on what we were promised with RHEV 3 vs what was delivered either, or the fact that I was told our problems would be fixed "in a couple months" all the way through October, then told it was ready but there was no upgrade path yet, and finally when there's a semi- sort-of upgrade path, it's too risky to justify. Companies like the one I work for don't like the risk and it was embarrassing to be kept waiting when Red Hat sales said a bugfix was imminent.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Jim Hall]

Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first...

That's an interesting UI decision. I would argue it fails the Obviousness criteria.

Here's an example: I use a laptop, with a 22" desktop flat-panel monitor as my second display. For me, it works well to run Chrome, GIMP, and other "large real estate" programs on the desktop monitor. (I run "small real estate" programs on the laptop display, such as Nautilus and Terminal.) GNOME presents the "Activities" action (hot-corner) on my laptop display.

So if my program is running on the 2nd display, there's no connection between the "menu" you describe and the program.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

We should also add your post as an entry to the "dipshit of the year" competition.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Woof! What a snappy comeback! Well, the Jerkstore called, and they're running out of you.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[arth1]

The hubris you display in your post is at least part of the same problem as Gnome users experience.

If I didn't treat my users with humility and respect, I'd be out of a job. I'm surprised that Red Hat accepts it.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

I'm getting paid exactly nothing to post on Slashdot. Exactly nothing. I really should be doing something more productive with my time, but I'm an idiot.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

Once again, for the hard of thinking, I am not a GNOME developer. I have precisely zero commits of any kind at all to GNOME.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

I'm not claiming that GNOME 3 is perfect, or RHEL, or RHEV, or anything else to do with RH. Hell, I've never run RHEV. Or, for that matter, RHEL.

What I'm trying to do is point out that a debate people like to load up as if it's Extremely Philosophically Important really isn't. This idea that a desktop environment must somehow give the user 'complete control' of how they use their desktop is an utter fallacy. No desktop environment possibly can.

It is entirely legitimate to argue that GNOME sometimes draws the line too far towards 'developers make the decisions'. There are legitimate arguments on the other side too. But the point is that you are arguing about where to draw a line that has to exist, you are not arguing about a fundamental philosophical difference. There are decisions about where to draw that line that are pretty much objectively absurd. Then there is quite a wide spectrum within which it is somewhat reasonable to draw the line, and a whole range of different consequences for different use cases depending on where a given piece of software draws the line. I don't dispute that. I just want to point out very clearly that this is basically a technical decision, it is not some kind of Great Philosophical Conflict. GNOME is not stealing your freedoms.

It's rather like how, in many countries, you will find two political factions producing grand ideological arguments about a decision which boils down to 'should the tax rate be 42% or 43%'. It's a technical discussion about where exactly to draw a given line, it is not a huge ideological debate.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

I'm sorry, I thought this was Slashdot, not a goddamn corporate conference.

I've got one person accusing me of being a PR flack, and one person accusing me of not 'treat[ing] my users with humility and respect'. You can't win around here, apparently.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

I think there are a few upstream bugs about the problem of using the global menu with apps on secondary displays, it's recognized not to be a great experience at present.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should think about what you write before you post. And if you can't figure out why that post was stupid, arrogant and unnecessary perhaps you should stop altogether.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[water-and-sewer]

Ha ha, I recognize this comment was intended as a lighthearted joke. But the fact is E17 currently offers fantastic usability, and customization. It starts with sane defaults and a very usable and efficient desktop with good workflow. But if you want to get under the hood and start tinkering, the options are there for you. Even stuff like "full screen everything" is possible (and easy to configure) without it being forced down your throat like a sh*t sandwich, like gnome3.

I've been using it on BodhiLinux for over a year now, and I love it. Especially on my netbook, it makes great use of screen real estate.

So, back to bashing Gnome 3!

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[jbolden]

Most of the people whining about Gnome aren't the people who drop many thousands on enterprise Linux distributions. RedHat doesn't make a desktop product anymore, they aren't RedHat's customers.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[jbolden]

It is completely unfair and you are right to object. You aren't a PR person and you are perfectly entitled to tell the truth.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[RabidReindeer]

All it shows is someone else knows how to program better. Not how to use it better as you seem to think.

All it really shows is that someone devoted a lot of time towards developing a UI, as opposed to what I devote my time to.

Since "program better" to me includes producing a usable product, I'd definitely argue that they know how to "program better".

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he wants to and because he can. I suspect modifying GNOME 3 to do what he wants isn't actually a viable option.

I haven't used GNOME 3 yet, but not long ago I tried Cinnamon, and try as I might I couldn't set up how I wanted it, but I could set up Mate and Compiz to do what I want, you could say because I had to spend time configuring Mate and Compiz they don't fit my needs, but it happens they will do what I want, and by that criteria they do fit my needs.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[arth1]

Most of the people whining about Gnome aren't the people who drop many thousands on enterprise Linux distributions.

Actually, we are one and the same. See, many of our dozens of Red Hat servers and VMs have users on them. Users who run graphical applications.

RedHat doesn't make a desktop product anymore, they aren't RedHat's customers.

Someone please tell RedHat that then, because they still think they do.
I even have a box right behind me that just came in, with RHEL 6 Workstation that I need to configure for an engineer. It's not the only one.

I can only guess that you are not one of the people who drop many tens of thousands on Enterprise Linux distributions, because you don't seem to know a lot about them, nor how they're used.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[jbolden]

I can only guess that you are not one of the people who drop many tens of thousands on Enterprise Linux distributions, because you don't seem to know a lot about them, nor how they're used.

Well you would be wrong.

See, many of our dozens of Red Hat servers and VMs have users on them. Users who run graphical applications.

Not client server apps. The server OS doesn't matter.

As for RHEL desktop you are right about that one. Didn't realize they had brought that product back.

Re: Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[AdamWill]

It's not "effectively" a fork of GNOME 2, it *is* a fork of GNOME 2. That's its raison d'etre. It's somewhat buggy, though, due to the trickiness of integrating with newer underlying stuff.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[arth1]

As for RHEL desktop you are right about that one. Didn't realize they had brought that product back.

It never went away.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, File menus frequently don't let you do operations on files either. *Firefox* has a 'File' menu. Which has "Work Offline" and "Quit" on it. How are those actions on Files, exactly?

They operate on the Firefox.exe file. ;)

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Adam, let's face it, there are a bunch of folks out there that can't see past what they like about the old gnome desktop. Tell them what we will, they're not going to like it. The same is true for almost everything new in the world, from Coke to peanut butter. Replying to them just gives them the resistance to sink further into their pre-ordained position and want to stay there.

In Tai Chi you learn that when you push back against someone you only give them your strength without changing their position at all.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

Any distro that defaults to Gnome is shit and not usable. Does it suck to work on something as shitty as Fedora? It would depress the hell out of me to work for a shitty company and work on a shitty product.

Your Welcome

[schrodingersGato]

I approve of the code name of this release

Re:Your Welcome

[wonkey_monkey]

I twitch at the subject line of your post.

Re:Your Welcome

[jfdavis668]

I'm a Spherical Cow man, all the way...

Re:Testing the character parsing of every web site

[amorsen]

More importantly, testing the character parsing and handling of both the installer and multiple other parts of the distribution. Whether it was a good idea to pick a challenging name is probably dependent on the observer.

Your a faggot

[Anonymous Coward]

I disapprove of your post.

Unstable X crashed my laptop reinstalled Fedora 17

[Anonymous Coward]

What the title said, but with much swearing and cursing added here in the comments F17 reinstall related.

Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I won't get into the Fedora vs Distribution X discussion.
Has anybody here tested the latest Fedora release? Can you recommend it on a daily machine (some office, some basic programming, browsing, listening to music)?
I am not sure if I should go with it or stick with Fedora 18 until Fedora 20 comes out...

Thanks.

Re:Sticking with F18

[AdamWill]

If you're doing basic stuff, F18 is working for you, and you don't see any shiny features in the newer version of whatever desktop you use that you really want, there's no pressing reason to upgrade, but you would probably be fine if you did upgrade. For my work, F19 works fine, so did F18, so would any other distro, really.

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora has never been an end-user distro. It always been targeted for the tester, the bleeding-edge power user, the tweakers and tinkerers. As an use everyday OS with a minimum of hassle, you'd be better off using Debian stable, or even Ubuntu or its derivatives, or OpenSuse etc. Fedora is for testing the next tech going into Red Hat's next version of RHEL. It always has been no matter what Red Hat acolytes say.

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what your talking about.

Or you never do any serious work on your machine.

Re:Sticking with F18

[AdamWill]

I do love being told I don't know anything by ACs.

Re:Sticking with F18

[AdamWill]

"Fedora is for testing the next tech going into Red Hat's next version of RHEL. It always has been no matter what Red Hat acolytes say."

if this were true, Fedora would not have something like 5x as many packages as RHEL does.

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it would still be true. In the same way that Debian Unstable has more packages than Debian Stable (packages that don't meet criteria for Stable are dropped).

And what exactly is wrong with admitting that Fedora is a testing ground for EL, when it clearly is? Anyone worth their salt already knows the truth.

Re:Sticking with F18

[turbidostato]

"if this were true, Fedora would not have something like 5x as many packages as RHEL does."

See?

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=17443218&sid=214388

Re:Sticking with F18

[Junta]

Yes it would. That's part of the test. Gauging relative interest in packages is part of the whole situation. Sure, enthusiasts get to come along for the ride and the developers get to try out things they would otherwise be forbidden from trying that they *want* to do, but the core mission of Fedora is, effectively, a proving ground.

It's the nature of the beast. Ubuntu is the same way, there is an ulterior motive at play. It's the simple truth of commercial linux. The question is to what degree the ulterior motives conflict, do nothing, or align with user goals. Fedora delivers cutting edge function first which causes some consternation as it fails, but for a respectable sized audience, that is a fine price of admission for experiencing new things first and, in some cases, getting to shape how immature technologies ripen.

Re:Sticking with F18

[armanox]

I'm going to second this. I've been running the KDE edition of F19 for a while now on my secondary work machine (Phenom II x4, 8GB RAM, Geforce 9800GT) without issue. While I don't do everything on there I do on my main machine, I haven't experienced a single crash or hint of instability. (Main machine is a FX-8130, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 5770. I also have Steam and VMWare workstation installed on here. Almost all of the issues I have stability wise are related to the ATI graphics card (though systemd and GRUB 2 still cause me grief. Firewalld has not been an issue, I will note)).

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're yet another butt-hurt "power user" whose fragile ego was damaged by being told he was wrong.

Re:Sticking with F18

[AdamWill]

It's *partly* that, but not *entirely* that. That ought to be pretty obvious to anyone involved in both projects.

There's clearly a relationship between Fedora and RHEL, but Fedora has its own identity as well.

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, didn't see my post above.
Thought it was deleted...
Please remove these both two comments...

Re:Sticking with F18

[CronoCloud]

I'm something between a "user" and "power user" and have been running Fedora as a basic desktop since F12. Haven't had too much trouble with it... in fact as time goes on I have to make fewer tweaks because things get fixed.

For example on the F17 to F18 upgrade my sound stopped working... because they fixed how HDMI sound works so I didn't have to set my HDMI output number a la (1,3) manually. A simple deletion of one line I had added to get it to work previously made it work automagically.

For media and the nvidia driver I just add the rpmfusion repo, install the stuff I want and it "just works".

I don't even have to manually set up printers... they're set up automagically without me doing anything...what's the fun in that? Though I've got a LaserJet 1200 which works better with PCL hpijs than the default Postscript because it's got the minimum RAM.. so I do have to change that.

Re:Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong about what? That he's a Fedora QA Community Monkey? That's a term he used to describe himself on the Fedora wiki. Here's his job description as written by him:

"Are you interested in working for Red Hat? Got experience working in F/OSS communities – particularly the Fedora community? Do you have or can you convincingly fake some kind of understanding of or at least interest in QA, or at least QA as practiced by Fedora (which bears little resemblance to anything you can study in QA School, so don’t worry if you don’t have the qualifications)? Then you might be interested in applying for this job!"

Apparently, the job doesn't require knowing anything about QA. So what does it cover?

"This will involve getting involved in our processes and making sure they’re community friendly, helping to organize and publicise community-focused events like Test Days, and lots of things along those lines. "

Sounds very PRish to me.

Re:Sticking with F18

[AdamWill]

That's not my job description, that's a (jokey) job description I wrote for a position we were hiring for. Why would I write a hiring notice for my own position?

You can bold the word 'publicise' as much as you like, but this thread is not a 'community-focused [QA] event', and I ain't on the clock.

Re:Sticking with F18

[bingoUV]

Is installing with encrypted btrfs / partition supported ? I can't find an answer in the documentation.

I installed the beta in a VM with a live MATE image (where I created the boot and / partition in the installer itself). It allowed the btrfs encrypted /, though it was not obvious at first.

When I tried installing using the same image on my physical machine - where boot is a existing partition I don't want to format during install, and / is another existing partition (ext4, not encrypted), it is just not giving an option for btrfs in the drop-down for file system.

Same thing working very differently in VM and physical machine. It would be great if you could point a solution. I'm fine with text install, but please no kickstart for me. I'd ask it in fedora forums too , if I don't find an answer anywhere else.

thanks

Re:Testing the character parsing of every web site

[AdamWill]

And whether you really really want it to always display correctly on the login screen on VTs...sigh.

No codecs, ugly fonts

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I want that. Another distribution that need to be fixed before passing basic usability test. It's either you become a M$ or Apple whore and sell your personal life or spends days tweaking your Linux distro. And if this is not enough as soon as you get comfortable with one, it becomes obsolete.

Re:No codecs, ugly fonts

[Psychotria]

Fonts on Linux these days look better than Windows 7 (in my opinion) and on par or better than OSX. If you want to tweak to your hearts content (or just set an aesthetically pleasing default) then use Infinality.

Re:No codecs, ugly fonts

[Junta]

Add rpm-fusion and livna and you have everything you may want on the codec front.

I agree that Fedora could make this easier, but it isn't too onerous as it stands, install two rpms and things get in order.

Re:Testing the character parsing of every web site

[robmv]

I think it was a good decision to continue using that name when bugs started to appear, like this bug Fedora 19 bugs cannot be reported because the server side cannot handle the release name "Schrödinger's Cat"

I like Gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person in the world that thinks Gnome 3 is actually pretty cool? Once I stopped bellyaching about being forced to do things a different way I actually started getting things done faster and with less mucking about. It still beats out the 'Metro' interface if you ask me and it seems like they are getting ready for touch which seems reasonable at this point in the road.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[AdamWill]

No, lots of people do. Just the ones who don't are loud and annoying.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[RedHackTea]

Agreed; it grew on me as well. When it was first released, I was actually excited for something trying to be different than Windows and Mac OS X -- much like with tiling window managers and E17. But, the people at Fedora don't live in a box, they provide many different ISOs with different default DEs, and they provide easy groups/collections to install different DEs using yum. I have GNOME and LXDE installed and don't have a problem. If I need blazing speed, I log in using the LXDE session, else I use GNOME.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

No, lots of people do. Just the ones who don't are loud and annoying.

I get the impression you're involved with either Fedora or GNOME development. That's cool; I don't care for either project (I'm primarily a Debian/KDE user), but they still have a place, and it's good that you're involved in something you like. Still, when one is very close to the creation of something, one tends to have trouble being impartial, and you're showing that here.

You should probably take a deep breath, put down the keyboard, and go take a walk or something. You've spent over an hour in this discussion telling everybody how they're 'wrong' for having opinions you disagree with or for not having nice things to say about your pet project, and now you're starting down the path of insulting people for having different opinions. That's not a good way to represent a project, no matter how passionately you may disagree. All you're doing is giving FOSS haters more ammunition, so they can go "see, look how those freetards act! Look how unprofessional they are!"

The best thing you could have done was stay hands-off and not post anything, or maybe one post somewhere in here to provide a counter-example to the nay-sayers. Instead, you've chosen to single-handedly make a bad impression with many of the people reading these comments. At best, you're making people think ill of you personally, and at worst, you're making them bitter about Fedora or GNOME, because you're representing them by being combative, and people will think of that when they think about the projects.

FWIW, I'm not writing this in response to anything specific said, or any particular comment made; this has been my only post and I have no real investment in the overall topic beyond hating seeing open source misrepresented by someone with misplaced good intentions.

Anyway, good luck and try to relax.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[Junta]

I really miss window title search, and show only one application from my compiz/kde experiences. This is after a lot of extensions which I think is a pretty atrocious replacement for simple configurabilty, but it isn't hopeless... the 'activities view' concept seems good and, most critically the alt-tab makes larger window counts actually manageable.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[AdamWill]

I'm perfectly relaxed, thanks. I made two simple assertions which are amply backed by evidence in this very discussion: that more people than just the sub-thread OP (and myself) like GNOME 3, and that people who don't tend to be loud and annoying. Ample evidence for both of those, found right here. I'm feeling just fine about that post, thanks.

I am very involved in the production of Fedora. I am not involved in the production of GNOME, beyond testing it and reporting bugs - but then, I do that for KDE, MATE, LXDE, Xfce and Sugar too. I have tested all of those, reported bugs in them, and fixed bugs in several of them. I just happen to like GNOME, myself. I am not Required To Like it: RH staff working on Fedora are entirely free to use whatever the hell we like as long as our jobs get done. I know for a fact there are RH Fedora staff using every desktop/WM under the sun, and some blackhearts running OS X. I just like GNOME. I like GNOME on my spare time. No-one is paying me for it, though if the GNOME Foundation has some spare cash rattling around, I wouldn't object. :P

Re:I like Gnome 3

[AdamWill]

Oh, and again, this is Slashdot. "Combative" is the price of admission around here.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

I made two simple assertions which are amply backed by evidence in this very discussion: that more people than just the sub-thread OP (and myself) like GNOME 3, and that people who don't tend to be loud and annoying. Ample evidence for both of those, found right here. I'm feeling just fine about that post, thanks.

I was referring to how you've presented yourself throughout the entire submission discussion, not this specific thread. The tone of your posts at the time of writing that were showing increasing belligerence throughout, making it look like you were losing your temper, and I wanted to point out how it appears to outsiders before things went nuclear.

I chose the post I replied to somewhat randomly; it was just fairly quiet in this one compared to others.

I just happen to like GNOME, myself. I am not Required To Like it: RH staff working on Fedora are entirely free to use whatever the hell we like as long as our jobs get done. I know for a fact there are RH Fedora staff using every desktop/WM under the sun, and some blackhearts running OS X. I just like GNOME. I like GNOME on my spare time. No-one is paying me for it, though if the GNOME Foundation has some spare cash rattling around, I wouldn't object. :P

That's cool, there are a lot of choices that are worth using. I wish more people would try different configurations and find what works for them like that. Being able to mix and match has always been one of the strengths of the X/WM/DE/app design, in my opinion. I've always liked trying different DEs and WMs, figuring out what I like, and combining parts until I get something I'm happy with. Everyone has different needs, so having the different parts work well together is a good thing.

Going a bit off-topic: my DE of choice these days is KDE, but that's just because I like kwin*, krunner, and the flexibility of the plasma desktop, not because of some inherent failings in the other options. Actual application use is a mix of Qt and Gtk apps depending on what works best for me, regradless of DE. I used to primarily use WindowMaker, but now I mostly only use it for remote desktops.

Oh, and again, this is Slashdot. "Combative" is the price of admission around here.

It doesn't have to be. I've personally never found the need to, despite choosing to post anonymously and having nothing to lose if I were to choose to be a jerk. If someone's being combative, I find a better to respond to, instead.

On a similar note, thanks for responding despite me being AC. Lost access to my original account years back and never made a new one. Partly because I hated the thought of replacing a five digit ID with whatever they're up to now, and partly because I don't comment often enough to be worth it. (Which is how I lost my pass/email in the first place.) Maybe a comment or two every few months, at most.

* Kwin, especially, is top-notch, and generally plays well with other DEs

Re:I like Gnome 3

[FireFury03]

Am I the only person in the world that thinks Gnome 3 is actually pretty cool? Once I stopped bellyaching about being forced to do things a different way I actually started getting things done faster and with less mucking about. It still beats out the 'Metro' interface if you ask me and it seems like they are getting ready for touch which seems reasonable at this point in the road.

No, I've liked Gnome 3 from day 1 - I had hated the "windows-alike" DEs like Gnome 2 and had been using Enlightenment 17 (development release) for years, but when Gnome 3 came along it seemed like about the best DE I'd used so I switched. There are, of course, niggles and WTFs (things like not being able to disable the screen blanker - I mean, really, would it have been way too confusing for users if there was a "never" option in the screen timeout dropdown?), but you get niggles with all DEs.

What I don't get is why every time Slashdot has an article about Fedora, most of the posts boil down to "Fedora's shit because it has Gnome 3" - seriously, no one's forcing you to use Gnome 3, if you don't like it there are plenty of other DEs packaged for Fedora; don't condemn the whole distro just because one of its defaults doesn't sit well with you and you're too lazy to do the trivial job of changing it.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[jbolden]

I think Gnome 3 is really cool as well. I think the Gnome developers did the right in the direction they went. I think the Gnome political structures did a truly terrible job in alienating Canonical and creating a fork as well as not doing something like Mate and keeping Gnome 2 a viable option during the rough initial years for Gnome 3.

Mostly though /. has become ultra conservative, they don't like any sorts of changes whether it be Gnome3, Metro, IPV6.... 12 years of IT stagnation have created a generation of IT workers who like stagnation and support stagnation. It is a pity.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[jbolden]

This is /. . Last time I checked we talk to engineers and they are combative. When you want to talk to PR people go to a trade show. I think Adam has the right to say what he thinks and if that means believing the critics are morons, and calling them morons so be it.

He doesn't represent anything more than his own opinion. Anyone who judges a product's customer facing personality based on the personality of the engineering team lacks the experience to lead RFI/RFP processes.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[AdamWill]

As it happens, I don't think I've called anyone a moron in this thread. (Might be a first!)

Re:I like Gnome 3

[bingoUV]

I get that there can be people who would like Gnome 3. The problem I have is - it got "marketed" to people who were using Gnome 2. I say marketed because there were people who were using the distributions with default DE which was Gnome , or even choosing Gnome out of other options. Same people, using same options, one fine day started ending up with Gnome 3. Mate and Cinnamon didn't even exist then, and are buggy even now (tried MATE and Cinnamon on Mint 14 LMDE, upgraded to latest, lots of basic bugs).

If Gnome 3 were being "marketed" as a completely different DE(an understatement) , it would have been fine. It would have been used by people who were looking for change. But instead it went to people who were looking for either no change, or more features. Gnome 3 provided neither.

Consider people who stay nearly on the cutting edge because they want the newer features being developed in the open-source world. They are vocal because they are involved - sometimes even develop, but almost all of them testing the limits of the new software. Typically it doesn't happen that new development deprives people of features. Even the infamous PulseAudio episode - people had an option to keep using OSS / ALSA for a long time after PulseAudio became available, and even default. I never blamed Fedora for early inclusion of PulseAudio even though there were rough edges. That was because, if you fought with it just a little, you could re-enable OSS/ ALSA - or sometimes even get all the features with PulseAudio. Fedora, and other cutting edge distribution users won't grudge the fight.
Gnome 3 was different because there the lack of features were by design - and going back to Gnome 2 at the time meant staying with old releases of distributions, or a lot of software building.

Maybe the dissatisfaction should have been directed at the distribution maintainers - but maybe not. Not, because the distribution maintainers were providing what they promised - cutting edge software. The cutting edge software ended up with less features wasn't their responsibility, directly.

Re:I like Gnome 3

[jbolden]

I agree with you. The Gnome 2 crowd was a terrible crowd for Gnome 3. I honestly am of the opinion the Gnome 2 crowd wasn't good crowd for Gnome 2. Part of the problem was Ubuntu having picked Gnome over KDE. Ubuntu had developed a community of Linux enthusiasts. Gnome foundation never envisioned Gnome as a DE for computer enthusiasts of any stripe. Gnome for them was meant to be a general purpose desktop where functionality for Linux powerusers was sacrificed to ease of use for the general population.

Gnome in the Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 days had been very focused on winning the battle for usage among Linux desktop users and system admins (i.e. generally computer enthusiasts) against KDE. And that had constrained it somewhat. Gnome 3 wasn't going to be similarly constrained because at the time Gnome 3 was defined Gnome's problem was getting to non-enthusiasts and beating systems like iOS or BB7.

The Gnome foundation should have encouraged distributions to have maintained Gnome 2 particularly Ubuntu. In many ways the same mistake KDE made with KDE 4. The real problem was compounded by the fact their relationship with Canonical was in the toilette at the time.

oh goody

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what they've irrevocably broken this time.

captcha: depress

says it all, doesn't it.

My favorite feature in Fedora

[ikhider]

Are the install errors! Nobody is chock full 'o install errors like Fedora! Error 17, error 19, error 20! Each install attempt is like an easter egg hunt! Makes installing Gentoo a sunday afternoon stroll in the park by comparison! SE Linux is also a favorite! A security feature brought to you by the NSA, because they really care!

Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the "New Generation" of programmers, Have no fucking clue?

These idiots that have taken for granted the existing stable conventions, One's they cut their teeth on.
And now thinking they know better - By going down this Tablet interface path - With everyone along with it?

HEAR IS A CLUE FOR ALL THE GNOME DEVELOPERS - AND DISTRO'S LIKE UBUNTU.

FUCKING SPLIT THE PARIGAM, FUCKING OBVIOUS ISN'T IT?

PEOPLE WANT THIS:

1. Servers. (No change here)

2. Desktops - Stable. (We really wan't DESKTOP's in their traditional sense. We don't want hybrid touch screen desktops or tablet interfaces.
                                          Desktops are where hard and complicated work is done. Multi Screen - ie. Multi reference info while you work etc.)

2.5. Desktops - Yuppy. There will be some that want BLING on their desktop, So as long as the Tablet UI can be installed on a desktop
                                          AS an OPTION then this will keep those happy too. Key word here is OPTION. It's not the default for a "Desktop".

3. Tablets/Phones. (Here you can do all your fancy new interfaces. Here people CONSUME. Doen't matter if your new fancy
                                          UI makes things too simple - It's not a PRODUCTION critical platform. As long a people can WORK with it.)

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[arth1]

FUCKING SPLIT THE PARIGAM, FUCKING OBVIOUS ISN'T IT?

I'm sorry, but it must be so obvious that I don't see it.
What is a PARIGAM and how do I split it? Is it like an atom?

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[AdamWill]

Maybe it's more like an infinitive? Ooh, this is a fun game!

I'll make sure to file a bug tomorrow suggesting that we FUCKING SPLIT THE PARIGAM

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[FireFury03]

Do the "New Generation" of programmers, Have no fucking clue?

These idiots that have taken for granted the existing stable conventions, One's they cut their teeth on.
And now thinking they know better - By going down this Tablet interface path - With everyone along with it?

Who's going down a "tablet interface path"? I'm assuming you're talking about Gnome 3, and whilst it looks *vaguely* "tablety" I don't think I'd want to use it without a keyboard and mouse (and FWIW I find it works very well on both my desktop and laptop - I've not tried it on a tablet so I can't comment there but on my normal workstations it seems to work better for me than any other DE I've used).

2. Desktops - Stable. (We really wan't DESKTOP's in their traditional sense. We don't want hybrid touch screen desktops or tablet interfaces.

                                          Desktops are where hard and complicated work is done. Multi Screen - ie. Multi reference info while you work etc.)

My multi-screen desktop seems to work just fine with Fedora running Gnome 3. I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be...

2.5. Desktops - Yuppy. There will be some that want BLING on their desktop, So as long as the Tablet UI can be installed on a desktop

                                          AS an OPTION then this will keep those happy too. Key word here is OPTION. It's not the default for a "Desktop".

Again, assuming you're referring to Gnome 3 as a "tablet UI" (I'm not sure why you think it's a tablet UI, but lets ignore that for a minute), in what way is it not optional? If you don't like it, there are plenty of other DEs packaged for fedora, why not switch to one of them instead of bitching that you somehow don't have an option (which seems to equate to "I can't be arsed to change the defaults, all computers must come pre-configured exactly how I like them and everyone else be damned").

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[CronoCloud]

GP does have a point about separating the paradigm, which I agree with, though he did so not as coherently as he could have.

Though as many have said, if one doesn't like the tablet-ization of Gnome 3, it's not like there aren't lots of other options.

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[AdamWill]

The design of GNOME 3 has very little to do with tablets, I really don't know where that meme came from. You can read through the whole design document and about all it says about tablets is 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'. I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

It was designed for computers, pure and simple. You're perfectly free not to like it, but it doesn't have anything to do with tablets.

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[CronoCloud]

The design of GNOME 3 has very little to do with tablets, I really don't know where that meme came from.

It comes from how it looks and behaves, it looks much more like a mobile interface than any other desktop environment I have seen. Only Win8 looks more like a mobile interface.

You can read through the whole design document and about all it says about tablets is 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'.

More than "in mind" I think. What I personally think is some Gnome Developers saw how popular tablets were getting and were wanting to prepare for the future of Mobile Linux and decided that mobile-izing Gnome 3 was a good first step.

It's wasn't... the CDE/Win9x/2000/XP/Vista/7/Gnome2/KDE/XFCE interface paradigms are popular and became pretty much THE standard for a reason. There's a reason RHEL is sticking with "Gnome Classic" and not "Modern".

I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

Gingerbread? Honeycomb? Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say Gnome 3 has "mobile inspiration"

It was designed for computers, pure and simple.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are.

You're perfectly free not to like it, but it doesn't have anything to do with tablets.

Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing.

But ......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways! That's one of things that annoys some of us the most.

And I do not like or use Gnome 3, switched to XFCE in F16 once I tried out Gnome 3. XFCE behaves properly with a proper applications menu, quick launch buttons, application switcher, volume/network/notification/clock area and proper minimize/maximize/close buttons. Yes, I'm a UI traditionalist, I know.

Adam I'm not one to get overly loud about Gnome3, I think RHEL made a good choice with sticking with the new classic mode. I expected RH to force development on something like that to replace "fallback" because Gnome 3 totally breaks from the standard UI paradigm for business use.

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[AdamWill]

"I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

Gingerbread? Honeycomb?"

Well, no. There's a very superficial similarity, but in practice the difference is huge. On Android there is a top panel with icons in it, but you're not expected to actually touch those icons. They're purely indicators. They'd be terrible touch targets; far too small.

In GNOME 3 the stuff on the top panel isn't just informational, it is a bunch of targets you're actually supposed to use. You click on the network icon to configure the network, you click on your user name to get the User menu, etc etc. This would make a terrible tablet UI; those elements are far too tiny to be viable targets for finger touching.

"Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user.""

Here is the design document for the overview: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design#Activities_Overview . Here is the reasoning for the application picker design: "This enables new applications to be launched and open applications to be switched to. The avoidance of exclusive application categories and nested sub-menus is a distinct advantage of application launching in the shell compared with the GNOME 2 desktop. Users do not have to guess which category an application is in, and the motor control demands of the application picker are lower than those of menus. The application picker also utilises spatial memory, making it quick and easy to relocate applications." Nothing at all about tablets. (The key point is the thing about 'motor control demands': IIRC, the GNOME team did some usability testing on GNOME 2, and found testers often made errors in launching applications through nested menus, especially when using touchpads, because of how close items are together and how easy it is to move the pointer a bit wrongly and lose your spot in the menus).

"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are."

It just isn't. I don't know why you're so determined to believe something to be the case which is not, in fact, the case. It's not like the Shell design is some kind of huge top secret, the files are right there on the Wiki. You can go and look at them. If it was 'mobile inspired', they would say so. It just isn't. This is a plain fact, it isn't up for debate.

"Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing."

He keeps saying the same thing because it's true. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time accepting that. Why would we lie about it? If GNOME Shell was 'mobile inspired' I'd say it was. I don't see what mileage there'd be in lying about it.

"But ......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways!"

I don't know why you keep trying to lump us together, we are not the same thing at all. As I've said a thousand times, I like to talk about GNOME 3 because I like GNOME 3, I think it gets an unfair rap around here. It's entirely a personal choice, and has nothing to do with Fedora in particular. I was using GNOME Shell (the very early versions) before I ever used Fedora, on Mandriva, which is generally considered a KDE-native distro.

What I meant by the 'keep them in mind, kinda' thing was this single bit from the design document I linked above:

"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind"

That's it, that's all it has to say about 'tablets'. It's the last bullet point in a six bullet point list of 'Goals and advantages'. If you think that makes it 'mobile inspired', well, I dunno what to say.

Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 is rotting dog balls, it's great that you enjoy the smell, touch and taste of rotting dog balls, but could you and the other 3 rotting dog balls enthusiasts please shut the fuck up.

Gnome 1 sucked dog balls

Gnome 2 sucks old dog balls

Gnome 3 sucks rotting dog balls

I am sensing a pattern here.

BTW OpenSuse has long passed Fedora on any type of comparison you could make. Fedora is pointless shit, even worse than Debian, which is quite an achievement.

What's missing?

[Junta]

I'm just wondering what is perceived as missing., as producing images from releases has been pretty trivial for me. I use xCAT to deploy them, but I presume cobbler is comparably equipped in this regard. Driver injection and all when I'm producing images for environments requiring out of tree drivers, but that's a pretty rare circumstance while tracking modern distros...

Re:What's missing?

[AdamWill]

A live image needs to actually be live bootable, for a start, i.e. it needs a bootloader. We need to compress the live image to make it a tolerable size, and it needs to be built in such a way that the live installer can deploy it.

Honestly I haven't tried using puppet or anything similar to build a live image, I'm not the best guy to give you the answers. I just know what smarter cookies have told me. But you might want to talk to Kevin Fenzi about it, look him up, he'd probably be a good guy to answer questions: he's part of the release engineering team, and he's done some thinking about improving the generation process.

Cinnamon (Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce)

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved to Cinnamon desktop and all my complaints about gnome3 are gone. I love it. I also did a FesUp upgrade to Fedora 19 in the morning and I like it better. Finally gnome-online-accounts (useless for me) is not getting in the way of evolution

Re:Cinnamon (Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce)

[javajeff]

Why not just use MINT if you like Cinnamon?

Time to upgrade

[kokoko1]

FedUp still the recommended method to upgrade Fedora?

Re:Time to upgrade

[arth1]

I don't know how others upgrade Fedora, but "emerge -e system; emerge -e world" worked for me. Afterwards, it was quite a bit more usable.

Re:Time to upgrade

[kokoko1]

Dude we are talking Fedora here !gentoo.

Re:Time to upgrade

[arth1]

And installing gentoo is an obvious way to upgrade Fedora.

Re:Time to upgrade

[kokoko1]

Go for Slackware if you want to learn *nix way ;)

Re:Time to upgrade

[AdamWill]

Yes.

GNOME 3

[SIGBUS]

I think that's really more of a GNOME 3 complaint than a Fedora complaint. I've just spun up a Debian Wheezy install on my main system, since I'm fleeing Ubuntu (stuck with 10.04 LTS until the desktop updates stopped coming). I've been trying to like GNOME 3, but I'm about ready to shitcan it. I'm using the "classic" mode at the moment (I found that I flat-out hated the new, not-so-improved interface), but even in classic mode there's still a whole lot of dumbing-down that I find simply infuriating.

Example: I prefer to NOT have my screen blank on idle, since that plays hell with my KVM switch, and I prefer to turn off the monitor when I decide to, not when the computer thinks I should. When GNOME 3 (either Classic or Fisher-Price) goes into screen blanking when the KVM switch is switched to a different system, it will come back in 640x480 mode, this on a 1920x1200 monitor. Unfortunately, the GNOME 3 crew has decided that "Never" is not a valid setting for screen blanking, which means I had to 1) add a script to /etc/Xsession.d/ that runs xset -dpms and then run dconf-editor, navigate to org.gnome.desktop.screensaver, and shut off the idle-activation-enabled toggle. WTF? I shouldn't have to go through such gyrations just to turn of the damned screen blanking.

I've been running Cinnamon elsewhere, and that's pretty good (but a bit rough around the edges). I'm debating between MATE, Cinnamon, or XFCE for this Debian box. GNOME has jumped so many sharks that it's running out of sharks to jump.

Re:Testing the character parsing of every web site

[arth1]

What's ironic is that it broke because of the "Ã" which is a legal character in the release string, but not because of "'" which isn't - the definition states that quotes must be escaped. And they still haven't fixed that - the text string doesn't say "SchrÃdinger\'s Cat", as it should.

Re:Testing the character parsing of every web site

[arth1]

And even more ironic is that slashdot still can't handle UTF-8...
Spending countless man--hours on rounded corners and bandwidth-eating Ajax is apparently more important than fixing the broken text input.

Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[kokoko1]

Why not 3.10, Fedora 18 also running on 3.9.4 code.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[AdamWill]

"Why not 3.10"

Well, for a start, 3.10 stable came out several days after we finalized the F19 release images.

But Fedora kernels are rebased, these days: F18 and F19 will both get kernel 3.10 fairly soon.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh what I wished Red Hat did that to RHEL. They provide a distribution that should last for ten years, but keep the kernel at the same version. Yeah right 2.6.18, that will last forever.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[FireFury03]

Oh what I wished Red Hat did that to RHEL. They provide a distribution that should last for ten years, but keep the kernel at the same version. Yeah right 2.6.18, that will last forever.

Well it depends rather on what you mean by "last for years". The point of LTS releases like RHEL is that you install it and you get:
1. Bugfixes
2. Security patches
3. Very little breakage from any updates

What you explicitly don't get is new features every few months, because as soon as you go down the "upgrade for features" path, point (3) goes right out of the window. LTS releases are about installing a system and having it do the same old job day in day out for years, they aren't about installing a system and having the latest shiny features on it throughout its life. If you want all the latest features on every update, then thats what Fedora is all about, but with "regular new shiny" comes "regular new breakage" and there's not a lot you can do about that: "great stability", "new features" - pick any one.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[kokoko1]

Fedora != RHEL, the later one is for enterprises every package get certified before going into system, they just can't ship RHEL every 6 months with latest kernel from kernel.org.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[kokoko1]

Agreed.

Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is funny because my opensuse install has never broken on kernel updates in the all the years I have been using it. old != stable

GNOME 3.8 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What for ? Is anyone still using that crap ?

Sticking with F18

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there,

I am not sure if I should do the upgrade on F19.
I've read that for the first few weeks (months) after a release Fedora is more unstable than stable and bugs are fixed in this period.
Do you recommend staying with the previous release (i. e. currently F18) until the EOL has been reached?

Thanks.

usage stats

[dr_blurb]

The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:

Apparently in 2010 Fedora was the 2nd most used distro (from http://www.pcworld.com/article/2021273/another-year-another-totally-different-top-10-linux-distros.html).

In 2011 it was 3rd. In 2012 it was 4th.

And looking at the latest Distrowatch page hit rankings (which is what that article was using):
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity,
it now is 5th.

Re:usage stats

[FireFury03]

The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:

Out of interest, why ditch a distro because you don't like some of the defaults? Switching desktop environment is pretty trivial, there are plenty of others packaged for Fedora.

And looking at the latest Distrowatch page hit rankings (which is what that article was using):
  http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity,
it now is 5th.

Dunno about anyone else, but I use certain pieces of software because they happen to do a good job for what I'm using them for, not because they are popular. I don't really see any merit in ranking distros by popularity. Also, Fedora is primarilly a bleeding-edge testing distro, so I wouldn't necessarilly expect it to be as popular as something more stable.

Re:usage stats

[AdamWill]

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

Fedora made me switch to Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I have very little need for desktop applications besides a SSH terminal and a good browser. Luckily those are readily available in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The disaster GNOME3 created was so bad I moved to Windows to have a decent system.

Fedora for Macbook Pro Retina

[jbolden]

Can I hit you with something to take back to the Fedora team. Right now there is no Live Linux distribution that is set to run well on Retina. There really is no Linux that is targeting Apple since Yellow Dog dropped out after the switch away from PPC chips. Apple currently sells about 85-90% of all computers over $1k, that is they own the enthusiast market. In particular they have a nice chunk of the system admins.

From a marketing perspective I think it makes a lot of sense to make the experience on retina smooth. That is a one click installer for an image that can DDed onto a USB key to use on the retina. I think you have most of the pieces and creating an app that does nothing more than a basic partition plus DD is probably under a days work for a Cocoa programmer.

Re:Fedora for Macbook Pro Retina

[AdamWill]

Yeah, that's a Known Issue in general. It's not really something to be solved at the distro level, though (well, there will likely be bits we'll have to make sure are in place), but at the desktop level. There is someone working on high DPI support for GNOME:

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/06/28/hidpi-support-in-gnome/

So you might want to keep an eye on that.

Re:Fedora for Macbook Pro Retina

[jbolden]

The issue for the distribution is putting all the pieces together. For example you need to be running a newer kernel. You have to have the right drivers for the video. You have the extension to X to support switching video cards (or at least some sort of menu option to the end user). You need to have the high DPI support desktops. You need to have EFI on the live media. Etc...

Re:Fedora for Macbook Pro Retina

[AdamWill]

Oh, sorry, I thought we were just talking about the display resolution, didn't realize we were discussing the MBP Retina specifically in terms of that whole system. We do try reasonably hard to make Fedora run as well as possible on Macs, though there is unfortunately a bug in F19 which makes the install a bit harder than it needs to be on Macs:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979205

It needs a bit more testing to confirm, but it looks like a late change we put in to re-use existing EFI system partitions instead of always creating a new one rather screwed up Macs, and you'll have to use custom partitioning to get a working install on one :/

But aside from that bug we do try to have all the right stuff in place for Mac support, and Fedora is probably one of the better distros for installing on Macs. Nowhere near perfect, but probably one of the better choices.

Re:Fedora for Macbook Pro Retina

[jbolden]

I agree you all are working on it. I just think this is a useful niche to be fully tested and "out of the box" ready with a mac application that formats the USB drive.... For example having a predefined Parallels (a popular Mac VM) downloadable image takes at most a few days and puts you way ahead of other distributions. Moreover the Parallels team would probably be anxious to help and work on this jointly. Heck given this is RedHat they might even distribute the image with Parallels which means Fedora becomes for say 10-15% of all Mac users their "already included Linux".