Alan Cox Calls Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro"

[frantaylor]

Wow, such hate on here. Look, if you're really going to get pissy, don't blame the people at Red Hat. Blame the people at GNOME. My install of Fedora 18 KDE is working great. It's mainly the GNOME version that is having issues. Unlike GNOME, KDE doesn't generally remove or hide features either.

RedHat is paying the gnome developers! RedHat is completely to blame! By continuing to fund gnome development they are explicitly contributing to this disaster. I CANNOT understand how they allow this psychotic nightmare to continue. Any sane funding arrangement would have been cut off long ago.

And it's NOT hate. It's TOUGH LOVE. Did you ever see the TV show "That 70's Show"? The father character called Red, is always rude and condescending toward his children. When he is asked why he treats his children that way, he says "it is because I love them"

[chibimushi]

Giant step back

I have stuck with Redhat since Redhat 7.0. I have had all of the Fedora releases installed on my computers over the years. I have to say Fedora 18 is a huge step backwards.
The new installer is a disaster, and Gnome only gets worse. I had to actually add my HDDs to fstab manually. I spent forever trying to find and reverse even more settings in dconf. I then went to logout only to discover it's missing too. I can't get my screen to lock either unless it's set to lock on screen shut off.

[kevmif]

Fedora are trying so hard to be like Ubuntu - its pathetic. I'm pretty sick of it. Especially because I had to remove all the shit it installed afterwards because they took away my choices in their new piece of shit installer. I could have accepted this if it was a plan to add package selection back in later but certain people with their heads firmly up their backsides think its better this way. This is a massive step backwards.

Not to mention the fact that when I did a minimal install and attempted to install MATE afterwards, it would not work at all (X would not start). Went back and reinstalled with XFCE, then installed MATE afterwards. Frustrating, but not unexpected.

Then there is the services that start and run which the average user does not need and gets no choice over because they were not able to deselect those packages at install time. Not to mention the complete lack of a GUI to modify them (not too hard via command line but a little research is required).

What I find hardest to believe is that Red Hat are pushing / allowing all of this given their enterprise base. How the hell are they going to ask their customers to move from RHEL 6 to something that looks like the current iteration of Fedora!

[picasticks]

re: systemd-cryptosetup-generator: Failed to create unit file .... : File exists

that's a bug ... minor in that it doesn't impact function, but it's annoying. I've been seeing it since I first installed F18 beta. It's here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=879431

Anaconda crashed horribly for me trying to install an encrypted LUKS root with btrfs ... in the end I got it working with ext4 by creating the partitions manually. Assuming these bugs are fixed now that it's shipped. Still very rough around the edges, I'm not a big fan of the new Anaconda but can see where the design choices are coming from.

Did not realize the super-annoying lack of logout was a "feature". Oh god, I can't believe there's actually a code branch based off detecting the number of interactive users and hiding the logout button.

I do like Gnome 3 ... even if 3.6 dumbs down the preferences even farther (had to go to dconf-editor to enable horizontal scrolling with my touchpad). In Activity view there used to be a toggle between Windows and Applications (gone now, boo).

GMenu ... did not even realize that was a thing until a thread yesterday. So *not* discoverable.

Something so invisible needs to be killed. Gnome needs to stop hiding UI elements, it kills everyday usability. OS X has a few things absolutely right, like the app menu bar locked at the top of the screen (I can find the File menu of the current app with my eyes closed) and the Dock, which I can drag files to, it shows me notifications, I can use it as a plain launcher, it's on the screen all the time and so there's muscle memory always knowing where to go.

But at the end of the day Fedora 18 is better than 17, so it is the best and not the worst Red Hat distro. So many nice things like all the hardware buttons on my Samsung 9 worked out of the box.

[Prescience500]

RedHat is paying the gnome developers! RedHat is completely to blame! By continuing to fund gnome development they are explicitly contributing to this disaster. I CANNOT understand how they allow this psychotic nightmare to continue. Any sane funding arrangement would have been cut off long ago.

And it's NOT hate. It's TOUGH LOVE. Did you ever see the TV show "That 70's Show"? The father character called Red, is always rude and condescending toward his children. When he is asked why he treats his children that way, he says "it is because I love them"

You make a good point. I would personally love to see KDE become the Red Hat/Fedora standard again, especially since KDE's been improving so much and seems to have learned their lesson since 4.0

If they did that, I'd probaly buy more of thier stock.

[AdamW]

Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

Because there's a whole lot of other work in F18 that needs to get out, and a whole lot of F19 work that needs to get started. The installer is just an installer, it's not everything.

[nightmarex]

It does always amaze me how people are happy to download an entire *computer operating system* and throw it at their computer - with valuable data on it! - without even reading the damn documentation.

Yeah this lol. I just can't imagine not having something on my computer that's worth saving... I am trying to do my best with backups but I'm definitely backlogged.

For Pete's sake people, it's an operating system, not a new version of Angry Birds. You might want to read something about it before hitting the big red button....

Okay this is waaay too condescending. When did you start equating people testing out Fedora with brain dead smart phone app junkies?

GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

Hit the nail on the head here. Fellas (and possible ladies) This is LINUX!!! No one is stopping you from setting up ANYTHING the way you want.

GNOME 3 DEVS STOP FUCKING THE LINUX DESKTOP! YOU ARE THE REASON LINUX WILL NEVER TAKE ON DESKTOP! NOW EVEYBODY FOLLOWS YOUR DESIGN DECISIONS LIKE FUCKING SHEEP! YOU ARE TO BLAME!

LOL I love nerd rage.

[Ericg]

There's a guy on the Google+ thread who says "Not knowing that The World Had Changed, I downloded the DVD of F18 and tried up upgrade my machine" - where do these people come from? And what rock have they been living under while three thousand articles explained that F18 has a new installer? Sheesh.

I dont think its that they didn't see it. I think its closer to they expected more from a release that was so delayed. If Fedora had done this release on time and there were rough edges then people could just say "Oh they should have delayed it by a week or two" bitched about it for a little bit, and then shutup. But this is a release that was delayed by what? 3 months? People assume that you guys WERE fixing bugs in the installer and making it better and better, and therefore expected perfection.

GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

Any chance of KDE ever re-becoming the default? I know its an easy and clicking a different torrent / download link, but defaults speak volumes about a project and right now you've got KDE and XFCE as the only "sane" desktops. By "sane" i mean traditional / classical. That or Fedora should consider shipping various extensions enabled by default for Gnome-Shell so that its not as much of a shocker when people first see it.

[yogi_berra]

Because there's a whole lot of other work in F18 that needs to get out, and a whole lot of F19 work that needs to get started. The installer is just an installer, it's not everything.

Congratulations, I didn't think it would be possible for you to minimize and dismiss customers' complaints so easily. Keep enjoying the rockstar developer lifestyle.

[Alejandro Nova]

At least we have coined a new rule:

Every Fedora release that is a multiple of nine is an unmitigated piece of crap. Guaranteed.