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

[LinuxID10T]

Which desktop environment do you try to install? You mention about server meaning you might likely run in terminal mode. (CTrl+ALT+F2). It appears you have encounter a bug so you can report it with provided screenshots.

Fluxbox and Blackbox. Most Red Hat based server distros run with a desktop environment, so wrong. No there is no bug, it is a "feature" because anyone who thinks they have the brains to use Fedora is truly retarded. I mean, it has to be one of the most obnoxiously difficult to use distros, yet they think that the people using it won't like basic features such as logging out. The Fedora and Gnome 3 team have a serious sickness. Normally I don't like making rants like this, but this is just batshit insane!

[GreatEmerald]

One more review that does the rounds currently and which heaps criticism especially on the installer:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-18-kde.html

Just read that, and had a pretty good laugh out of that The new installer really does look really, really awkward. Thinking of which, it's pretty amazing how openSUSE's YaST installer, while being around for quite a large number of years (it was in pretty much the exact same form as it is now back in SuSE 9.2 times, if not earlier), is still one of the most sane and streamlined installers I have seen. Novell must have put a good amount of thought into that.

[AdamW]

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.

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. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. 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.

So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list. It works fine. If you want a nice polished version of newUI, you might want to wait for F19 or F20. It won't kill you. An operating system installer is a psychotically complex lump of code, it is not plausible that you can entirely rewrite one and get it working perfectly on the first try, and we never aimed to. We aimed to have something that broadly implemented the new design and worked reasonably well in simple cases, and that's what F18 has.

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.

[Delgarde]

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. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. 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.

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?

[blackiwid]

isnt a distribution not classicaly a product like fedora and not a special version of it? so how can a version be a bad distribution... or is that more from the word source... when we talk here in germany from a distribution we say debian is a distribution and fedora is a distribution... maybe thats like calling here mobile phones -> handys ^^ denglish...

[finalzone]

Fluxbox and Blackbox. Most Red Hat based server distros run with a desktop environment, so wrong. No there is no bug, it is a "feature" because anyone who thinks they have the brains to use Fedora is truly retarded. I mean, it has to be one of the most obnoxiously difficult to use distros, yet they think that the people using it won't like basic features such as logging out. The Fedora and Gnome 3 team have a serious sickness. Normally I don't like making rants like this, but this is just batshit insane!

For you, Linus Torvals and the gang are retarded because they use Fedora on daily basis. Good way to make a friend. Do you really that approach will fix the problems?
Considering the use of Fluxbox and Blackbox, did you file a bug report? Did you think that maintainers of those packages are responsible regardless the distribution?

[LinuxID10T]

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?

Thank you for this insane amount of common sense (any.)

[combuster]

I have somewhat mixed feelings with Fedora 18. I use it at work since it's gone beta, and I still use it. At home however it can not simply get near to Arch Linux.

Fedora 18 pros:

- The new enterprise login feature. I can join my box to the Windows domain in matter of seconds - before I had to fiddle with samba, winbind etc and it always ended up being a 4hrs long task.
- Xfce finally have lightdm as a default desktop manager
- It's rock solid stable, I do a lot of work on it and never had a system crash or that some process is segfaulting (after killing bluez since i don't need it).

Fedora 18 cons:

- Swith to 256-colors terminal messed up some archaic utilities like uerf on digital unix when I log on to those boxes (just prints stdout instead of regular output). Switching to xterm by default fixes this.
- I, as everyone here, find the new installer useless. When I used network installer at work by the time I've configured my network settings mirrors wouldn't refresh any longer and it didn't applied the new settings at all. Absolutely horrible. I don't want to waste words on the partitioner either.
- It seems that problem with ntpd and systemd is not yet resolved, but this could be just me since I haven't found the time to dig into the problem a little deeper.

I can't comment on the packagekit or whatever fedora is using as a graphical frontend to yum, simply because I always use yum from terminal (after removing presto plugin, I have bandwith - cpu time is always in deficit).

I wouldn't call Fedora 18 the worst yet, I recall Fedora Core 3 messing disk geometry on tons of machines...

[frantaylor]

I don't believe you read his comment fully. He said, "Add another desktop environment or an user to enable log out."

It still makes no sense. There are use-cases where a single-user machine needs logout. For instance in a workplace environment where your workstation is also running a file server so you don't want to shut it off when you go home. You want to LOG OUT so your co-workers will not have access to your email but you don't want to shut down the machine. You don't want to leave your session running in the background because you will have open files on file servers and the sys admins will get pissed at you when they want to run backups. For instance at home when you don't want your sig other to be poking through your old love letters, you want to be able to LOG OUT without turning off the computer because you still want to record that tv show using mythtv.

[Vim_User]

That is Gnome 3.6 feature, not Fedora. With a single user using only one desktop environment i.e Gnome Shell, it does not make sense to have a log out. Add another desktop environment or an user to enable log out. I can't believe some people are unable to grasp the logic especially due to their own blind hatred toward Gnome in some case.

There are quite a few good reasons to log out and log in again, for example when you added the user to a new group. You need to log out and in again to make the environment aware of that.