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

[GreatEmerald]

One nice undocumented feature of Fedora18, is the ability to log into the system in GUI mode as root. Moving files, deleting files, copying files, renaming files, in fact directory and file manipulation with a GUI interface is so much faster and safer than with command line.

That's horrible. You are supposed to do this, or an equivalent thereof:

kdesu dolphin .

[lsatenstein]

Fedora 18 with Cinnamon is just great.

Too bad Cinnamon is not available in the Ubuntu repository.

Too bad OpenSCAD does not have syntax highlighting.

Some guys are spoiled. Some guys always write perfect code. Some guys were born as perfect coders and programmers.

Fedora 18 applications are just fine. UEFI delayed Fedora development to where delivery was late. Is the installer a bad design. I definitely say no. The concept is very good. Do the updates according to your preferences, -- keyboard, language, and so forth.

Is it a beta implementation -- a first effort to make it work, I say yes. It needs some extra quality control.

My fault with Gnome is that has the design that is trying to please desktop users and tablet users. And it does neither very well. So, if the argument about Fedora 18 is negative, you must blame the DE. (Presentation design).

I use Gnome rarely with Fedora 18. Cinnamon is a fantastic DE for Fedora 18. Cinnamon replaced Nautalus, uses the Gnome GUI libraries and is superb. It makes Fedora 18 much better than Ubuntu. If Gnome continues with one more bad release, you can rest assured that it will not be number one for Fedora 20.

One nice undocumented feature of Fedora18, is the ability to log into the system in GUI mode as root. Moving files, deleting files, copying files, renaming files, in fact directory and file manipulation with a GUI interface is so much faster and safer than with command line.

Fedora18 recognizes that system maintainers are not dumbells, who have to be prevented from using a graphical user interface from a root logon.

Cinnamon and Fedora 18, a great combination.

[GreatEmerald]

I found this on the fscking Fedora homepage:


Good enough points to do a rewrite, huh? Guess the previous installer did suck...

Hmm, good points indeed. The multiple processes issue is also in YaST, and can get quite annoying (as is its inability to asynchronously download and install packages).

That raises another question, though - why did the UI have to change? Why not leave it as it was before, just on a new codebase?

[squirrl]

upgrades

Meanwhile,

Back at the Hall of Slack. Their 'setup` still uses the old ncurses package to provide stable installations one after another.

Fedora is for testing. RedHat had no interest in the desktop.

[eliac]

OK, this one example was not correct, I admit that. What about the other things mentioned in this thread where logout on a single user machine makes sense?

Remember: logout by default is not shown if there's a single user and only the Gnome shell session is available.
That covers the remarks I have read about Gnome developers not considering other desktops, and the remaining use cases seem to just fall in the remote access / headless background process category.

Now I very much hope that the same person who set up NFS or Samba or VNC server, who configured X for remote access or really needed to move users from group to group for some further reason won't have much trouble setting once and for all a gsetting by ticking a checkbox in a GUI or adding a one-liner to a setup script.

Really, that's what this silly fuss is about: a default that makes sense for the less techincal user and that whoever needs differently can override in about 30 seconds. The computer version of "first world problems", I'd say

[V!NCENT]

OK, this one example was not correct, I admit that. What about the other things mentioned in this thread where logout on a single user machine makes sense?

1. Leaving system on without logged users
How is that useful?

2. Switching DEs
Right. One can select spins for other DEs. In the case you want to mess with, say, Gnome3 and install E17, then why not also take the time to install Entrance (E17's Display Manager)? Problem solved and it looks a lot nicer too.

[V!NCENT]

I found this on the fscking Fedora homepage:

After many years of maintaining and developing the pre-Fedora 18 installer, the installer development team determined that a rewrite of the installer was necessary for a myriad of reasons, including the following:

The previous installer had an aging (around 13 years old) infrastructure that was difficult and time-consuming to maintain and improve, constraining new feature development. One current install team developer refers to the old infrastructure as "an incredible mess."
The performance of the old installer left a lot to be desired. Long-term tasks could not be performed in the background. This required long wait times and pauses throughout the installation experience. For example, as CPU and time-intensive tasks were processed, the UI would freeze for several moments until a given processing task completed.
The previous UI was not very responsive. This manifested in various ways, including a failure of the UI screens to redraw when the display was changed between a TTY and back to the UI.
The text-only version of the installer interface was a completely separate codebase, which increased the maintenance burden of the installer. This also increased the amount of work needed to implement new features as they would need to be written twice, once for each codebase.
The previous codebase was not written in a modular fashion. This caused issues where similar functionality in different modes (for example, GUI vs kickstart) used different logic and resulted in inconsistencies for users.
The automated kickstart mode of the installer was separate and incompatible with the UI modes of the installer. A separate utility, system-config-kickstart, was created solely to provide a UI for creating kickstarts since the existing UI could not be used for this purpose without a completed install.
The live media method of installation used a different codepath than the installer than the DVD method, causing maintenance and development difficulties and resulting in an inconsistent and at times buggy user experience.
The old installer's interface had a 'point of no return' past which any changes you'd made to your storage configuration could destroy data on your disk(s) and you couldn't go back to change it. Since the UI followed a linear path, this exact inflection point occurred close to the middle of the screen flow and required a rather discouraging pop-up dialog to explain the impact.
In previous versions of Fedora, the installer's interface followed a wizard design pattern , consisting of multiple linear screens with occasional nested modal pop-up dialogs. (See diagram below) While nothing is inherently problematic with wizards as a design pattern, the sheer number of screens required by the installer made it unwieldy. You could end up several screens into the process and need to go back and change something on an earlier screen, requiring a lot of clicking and screen flipping to go back and return to where you left off. Multiple modal nested dialog windows also made it confusing at times to interact with certain screens, in particular the partitioning-related screens.

Good enough points to do a rewrite, huh? Guess the previous installer did suck...

[energyman]

Maybe it's finally the time to actually address devastating Linux issues instead of constantly whining.

It's you, Linux developers, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds included, who chose this f*cked up, absolutely broken, rolling development model. It's you, Linux developers, who get mad at it (even Linus has complained several times that userspace applications got broken due to incompatible changes in APIs).

Maybe it's the time to change?

But no, we'll have similar threads, complaints and pieces of news over and over again. And no one will do anything. No wonder people avoid Linux like a plague. In a world where no one is responsible for anything, where QA and testing are unheard of, nothing will ever be usable.

P. S. I for one chose CentOS 6.3 - but I'm a happy guy, 'cause I can run vanilla kernel - LTS distros are unusable as well, because the kernel development model is outright broken.

well birdie, maybe it is time for you to stop posting bullshit?
LINUX has stable APIs AND ABIs for more 20 years.

Internal constructs are neither APIs nor ABIs.

Please stop posting until you started to think. People like you with their 'give me. NOW' attitude and no clue at all make me sick.

[AdamW]

You say that, but why? It's not a completely unfamiliar OS - it's just the latest upgrade to the one I've been running for years, and which I expect to work *more or less* the same way as the previous version.

...that happens to contain completely new installer and upgrader code, a fact which is specifically listed in the release notes, which you *really ought to read*. That's what I'm talking about here, as it's mostly what the thread has been about. The rest of F18 is a pretty normal release and should be pretty solid, but the installer and upgrader code is entirely new, and this is hardly something we've hidden.

My complaints are with the way you're presenting this as a big deal, that people shouldn't be upgrading casually. I'm sure it's not your intention, but your messages are coming across with a strong subtext of "don't trust this release".

It is a big deal, because any time you do a ground-up rewrite of code as sensitive as the installer and the upgrade system, there's going to be borkage. My personal advice is to ensure you back up any sensitive data before installing or upgrading to F18. This is actually the sensible thing to do before you upgrade or install *any* OS, yes even 'just the next version of the one you were using before'. Upgrading in particular is an inherently sensitive operation and subject to the same 'problem space' problem I mentioned earlier: we (distributors) can test upgrade _mechanisms_ reasonably well, but it's very hard to test that upgrade goes off without a hitch in all of the billions or trillions of possible machine configurations (storage configuration, bootloader configuration and package set, mostly). My experience across distros (at least MDV, Fedora and Ubuntu) and operating systems (Windows - Microsoft's official advice is that you do not rely on upgrades between Windows releases working without problems, and in several Windows releases, they didn't offer a real 'upgrade' mechanism) is that even with releases which *aren't* major rewrites, you shouldn't trust the upgrade function unreservedly.

[Delgarde]

Sadly seems to be true, but still not excusable. I wrote it a bit flippantly, but I am _genuinely_ amazed that it seems to be quite normal these days to assume you can throw a completely unfamiliar operating system at the computer that contains lots of your precious data and just expect to be able to Work Stuff Out As You Go Along. That's just bonkers.

You say that, but why? It's not a completely unfamiliar OS - it's just the latest upgrade to the one I've been running for years, and which I expect to work *more or less* the same way as the previous version.

And for the record, it *is* mostly working for me, once I worked out that I needed to manually install gstreamer1-libav to replace the older gst-ffmpeg - not strictly a Fedora problem since it's a third-party repo, but it did mean that none of my videos worked anymore. My complaints are with the way you're presenting this as a big deal, that people shouldn't be upgrading casually. I'm sure it's not your intention, but your messages are coming across with a strong subtext of "don't trust this release".