Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas Are Needed

[frantaylor]

I'll say it again for emphasis

I think there must have been a book-burning party at RedHat HQ. They took all of their books on user interface design and threw them on a bonfire. It's as if the Mac never happened and Tog never wrote his landmark book on UI design. The Fedora 18 installer in any sane universe would be a JOKE, there would be a story in the Onion about it. It could be a textbook example of how to not write a user interface.

Apparently there is nobody left at RedHat who ever used a Sun machine. Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with a Sun keyboard understands that they put the keys in the right place, and forever after they immediately configure their new computers to have a Sun keyboard layout. It used to take 5 seconds and a few clicks to do this, now it's a terrible mess.

[frantaylor]

It's a SERVER platform

Screw ANY and ALL development of desktop features. Just drop in a generic gnome or KDE or something that the sys admin can use to administer the platform. It's really not worth spending development time on interactive features for systems that run database and web servers.

I personally would LOVE it if a RedHat employee would bother to fire up rdesktop on a 64-bit system under valgrind and connect to a Windows 7 system. rdesktop works great with XP servers, but Windows 7 sends out different graphics commands and the code in rdesktop to handle them is just most miserable. On 32-bit systems it's only bad, on 64-bit systems, the X server gets corrupted and I end up having to reboot. The only way that I've found to successfully run rdesktop on my computer is to run it in a 32-bit virtual machine with remote X. The virtual machine suffers all manner of odd behavior and is otherwise unusable but I can actually manage to keep a remote desktop session running. I've tried installing Ubuntu, Fedora, gentoo, opensuse, and a whole host of distributions and every one falls down hard when rdesktop connects to Windows 7. I've tried different versions of rdesktop including checking out the source code and it's just a bad scene all around. It's really sad because I can pop my KVM switch over to my Mac and there I have a choice of RDP clients from Apple and Microsoft and they both work well. I know rdesktop is not a RedHat product but they do ship it with their system and thus they do have some sort of commitment to quality.

Phoronix whiners will say "fix the damned bugs yourself" but that's not part of my job description. I have way too many work items on my plate as it is, fixing bugs in someone else's code is way way way down on my priority list.

Otherwise I would say Please Please do not let your Fedora people anywhere near the enterprise stuff. After installing Fedora 18 I find it hard (impossible!) to believe that this piece of shit comes from the same people who package up RHEL. My goodness are they TRYING to screw it up? It certainly looks that way.

[alelinuxbsd]

Give a proper output about the packages that can't be update for priority protection instead, as happen now, simply say that a number of application can't be update without said anything other.

[alelinuxbsd]

Support for the last Cpu right out of the box (as Intel Haswell, etc.).
Since on their kernel should be present backports of functionality of new kernel.

[speculatrix]

why are people posting their wish lists here and not on the redhat site?

https://access.redhat.com/groups/red-hat-enterprise-linux-7-ideas

maybe it's because they realise that redhat don't really give a **** and closed that forum already without actually committing to anything?

I asked them formally why they can't provide tomcat7, and they trotted out the line that people want stability. well, yes, but they were doing tomcat6 in redhat5, so why not tomcat7 in redhat7? they also asked me why I wanted tomcat7 at all so I pointed out the release page and it all went quiet, i.e. they decided to park it.

even gnu coreutils on RHEL6.2 is version 8.4 which was released in January 2010, with many newer releases way way way back in time before Redhat 6 was released, so you'd have thought RH would have bothered to update such a key component?

if I didn't work in a PCI DSS compliant company I'd never have considered Redhat at all. sigh. I'm even wondering about whether it'd have been easier going through the pain of using ubuntu LTS and writing all the documents required to prove we were doing the right things to make compliant. sigh.

[gilboa]

I add even:
Replace openoffice with liberoffice.

Given the fact that Fedora >= 15 already switched to LO, and given the fact that RHEL7 will most likely be based on ~F16+, I believe this is more-or-less certain.

- Gilboa

[alelinuxbsd]

I add even:
Replace openoffice with liberoffice.

[alelinuxbsd]

Other two wish:
- the inclusion of the package pgAdmin inside the official repository
- the inclusion of the package postgresql 9x while maintaining the previous edition with the possibilities to install both on the same system (naturally using different locations).

[liam]

either make a free version (like OpenSuse) or point people to CentOS and pay a few people to sit in their IRC. Also, Do they need build servers? Help them with that also. You don't have to supply money just hardware. You can't compete with Ubuntu without doing this. Perhaps you should improve your relationship with ubuntu and SuSE. You have been doing well about pushing kernel updates to source as well as to your clients. Instead of being antagonistic about Ubuntu, you should show appreciation for their support in userland.

Ubuntu isn't a competitor with RH, as much as they may wish to be.
RH's primary antagonist has got to be Microsoft.
Also, they already pay so many of the Fedora developers (certainly more developers than Ubuntu employs) why should they also help out a direct competitor in CentOS? That makes little sense.

[DaemonFC]

Linux is alive on desktop and its popularity is growing. When there will be games available on Linux it will become much more popular than it's now. When comes to technical things we need Wayland. With Wayland, KDE and games there will be no single thing in Windows that will stop me from formating the C: drive.

Games just aren't important enough to me to turn my computer over to rootkit malware from companies like Macrovision and Sony. In return for making Windows a little more like hell, Microsoft turned around and made them Gold Partners.