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

Alan Cox, the venerable Linux kernel developer presently employed by Intel and an avid open-source enthusiast, has lashed out against the recent release of Fedora 18. Cox calls the new Fedora release, "the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen." Alan ended up switching to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

On his Google+ page yesterday, Alan Cox wrote:

So Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen.

The new installer is unusable, the updater is buggy. When you get it running the default desktop has been eviscerated to the point of being slightly less useful than a chocolate teapot, and instead of fixing the bugs in it they've added more.

It can't even manage to write valid initrds for itself instead on one machine of simply bombing into a near undebuggable systemd error (same kernel with F17 and F17 dracut works so its the dracut stuff)

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

Yeah wonderful. Time to re-install that box, and not with Fedora.

In another post later in the day, Cox wrote:

Ok so problem box switched to Ubuntu

Most stuff seems to have gone fine so far. The cunning plan to do some jitsu with the VM I decided against in the end - its doable but the VM thinks its on /dev/vda1 and /dev/vda1 is in fact an encrypted volume across a two disk md on the real host so fiddly.

It's mostly behaving but the monitor configuration tools suck and are so buggy I took joe to monitors.xml instead. The biggest problem though was the orange.. that had to go. It's now blue - something Fedora gets right ;-)

OpenSCAD is out of date (ok thats mean the new one is only a week or so old)

Gnome3 on Ubuntu sucks too so I stuck Cinammon on it.

Now to poke at the snag list

The past week I have been carrying out many Fedora 18 installations as I run various benchmarks on the much-delayed distribution: Fedora 18 Systemd Boot Performance Is Mixed, AMD R600 Gallium3D Is Mixed On Fedora 18, Intel Graphics See Some Gains On Fedora 18, and Fedora 18 Fails At ARM Wrestling Arch, Ubuntu, Linaro. (Many more performance benchmarks of Fedora 18 and compared to other Linux distributions are also on the way.)

My experiences with Fedora 18 haven't been quite so bad, though it's not my favorite release in having used Fedora itself since the Fedora Core 3 "Heidelberg" days. Though I do really hate the Anaconda changes found in Fedora 18.

You can share your Fedora 18 experiences with the Phoronix community by using the comment link below.