Fedora Project Leader Envisions The Project Becoming An "Operating System Factory"

[zexelon]

IMHO dep and rpm are both an hell.
gentoo (because of use flags) is the way to go and the only packaging system i really enjoy.

i'm on arch btw (sorry)

I will agree there! The Gentoo emerge system was probably my favorite package system. Both Gentoo and Arch have amazing documentation that is somehow written to be almost distro agnostic. I have used a lot of Arch documentation in my work on Ubuntu virtualization.

All that being said unfortunately I found Gentoo to be far to far down the "experimental development" line for daily use. I tend to need my systems and servers to be very quick to deploy and maintain even if it costs me some performance. In my experience nothing ever came close to the performance that Gentoo offered with aggressive optimization flags.

[unis_torvalds]

What linux needs in the next years is to eradicate distros.

If you are looking for a uniform one-size-fits-all experience, I know of a certain fruit-themed company who has the solution for you.

The entire beauty of the Linux ecosystem is the diversity: different solutions for different people and endless customization. You really think my idea of the perfect UX would be identical to yours?

[cl333r]

Sounds to me like empty PR hot air up the metaphorical ass.

[CommunityMember]

What linux needs in the next years is to eradicate distros.

That timeframe may be bit of a stretch, but in some ways, that is already starting to happen, at least in the server space, as everything runs in a container in a pod, and the CoreOS just runs the required the required Kubernetes services to manage those pods/containers. So one moves from different distros to different container image bases depending on your development requirements to build the solution. In the Workstation space, while almost certainly differently timed, more apps could move to a flatpak (or a snap for those of a different persuasion). This could substantially reduce the duplication of effort to package the same app for multiple distros, allowing those resources to be refocused.

[mroche]

I havent touched Fedora or any of its derivatives in years.... the RPM package format left such a horrible taste. I lost many evenings an nights of sleep recovering from RPM hell... so has that changed?

I wasn’t in the Linux community back when package managers were just starting out or when the real dependency issues were around, so I never experienced the full “<package_type> hell” many more experienced people talk about. However, having run RHEL and Fedora daily for the last few years, I rarely run into RPM dependency issues. They usually come in one of a few flavors (for me):

1. kmod-packages (NVIDIA) and a user doesn’t realize that they upgraded the kernel without having a proper updated driver package available (RHEL).

2. A package was upgraded that is now ABI incompatible packages dependent on it (_very_ rarely, if ever).

3. Modularity is the new one Fedora has to figure out. It’s easier on RHEL as they have a significantly smaller module offering and its very focused.

4. RPM groups not being proper. On RHEL 8 there’s an issue with file-roller in one of the sub-groups in “Server with GUI” where it sees release -2 in the repos, but wants -1 and errors out. Using --skip-broken and upgrading right after (forces the use of -1) solves that problem. Whether or not file-roller is supposed to be an orphaned package, I don’t know.

5. Packages from online/external repos that conflict with other repos (e.g. Nux/RPM Fusion, RPM Fusion/ELRepo) or don't include dependency information at all (e.g. Autodesk Maya). Usually the latter is from proprietary software, but not solely attributable to that.

Others may have other experiences with different packages and hardware/software setups that I just don’t see. But I wouldn’t trade yum/dnf for any other package manager to date, and I really like the RPM spec. It’s very easy to create, follow, and extend when needed. The speed of it compared to other comparable (that’s a key word here) managers/formats isn’t a big deal to me. RPM conflicts nowadays (to me) are the fault of the maintainer and distribution, not on the tool itself when it comes to standard usage. It just does what you tell it to do with the information available to it.

As always, this is personal experience and opinion.

Cheers,
Mike

Edited for typos and adding #5.

[Britoid]

I havent touched Fedora or any of its derivatives in years.... the RPM package format left such a horrible taste. I lost many evenings an nights of sleep recovering from RPM hell... so has that changed?

I find the Ubuntu apt / *.deb system is very stable and moderately hard to break (it can be broken... but in my experiences DEB hell is harder to get to than RPM hell...)

Is RPM dependency resolution still an unmitigated disaster? Is there a KDE version of fedora (i.e. like Kubuntu)?

RPM hell is a thing of the past.

Just never ever install RPMs off the web on Fedora.

[muncrief]

Well, that's interesting.

It's always seemed like Fedora was kind of desktop user agnostic. They didn't specifically try to discourage desktop use, but their default installations along with their complex, and poor and conflicting, documentation certainly made desktop installation much more challenging than it needed to be. They also had surprisingly poor hardware and package support compared to Debian and Arch derivative distros.

It's been around 3 or 4 years since I last tried it though, so I'll check to see if anything's really changed. And if it has I'll give it a spin in a VM and check it out again.

[ssokolow]

I will agree there! The Gentoo emerge system was probably my favorite package system. Both Gentoo and Arch have amazing documentation that is somehow written to be almost distro agnostic. I have used a lot of Arch documentation in my work on Ubuntu virtualization.

All that being said unfortunately I found Gentoo to be far to far down the "experimental development" line for daily use. I tend to need my systems and servers to be very quick to deploy and maintain even if it costs me some performance. In my experience nothing ever came close to the performance that Gentoo offered with aggressive optimization flags.

The biggest things I miss about Gentoo are eix as a package search tool and how cool Portage was with performing multiple operations simultaneously. (eg. Oops. I also wanted thing X. No problem, I'll just start a second emerge before the first one finishes.)

[Luke_Wolf]

5. Packages from online/external repos that conflict with other repos (e.g. Nux/RPM Fusion, RPM Fusion/ELRepo) or don't include dependency information at all (e.g. Autodesk Maya). Usually the latter is from proprietary software, but not solely attributable to that.

Others may have other experiences with different packages and hardware/software setups that I just don’t see. But I wouldn’t trade yum/dnf for any other package manager to date, and I really like the RPM spec. It’s very easy to create, follow, and extend when needed. The speed of it compared to other comparable (that’s a key word here) managers/formats isn’t a big deal to me. RPM conflicts nowadays (to me) are the fault of the maintainer and distribution, not on the tool itself when it comes to standard usage. It just does what you tell it to do with the information available to it.

openSUSE which uses RPMs handles this just fine by adding the concept of vendors into it's package manager, which makes it the only sane binary distribution to deal with conflicting packages in external repos.

[Volta]

Fedora is my second favorite distribution, next to Kubuntu. What I really like is dnf which removes all of the dependencies unlike apt-get in *Ubuntu. Aptitude used to work like that, but not anymore. However, there are problems with Gnome, Wayland and games. There's input lag and sometimes performance is bad. It's also the case with Gnome Shell.