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

[LinuxID10T]

I hardly think you can explain utter stupidity... Like hiding log-out buttons, or close application buttons (without making the decorations smaller), etc., etc., etc. I didn't like the removal/lack of features in Gnome 2, now it's a complete disaster.

Really, even in Gnome 2 and the fallback Gnome 3 it wasn't even THAT bad. I agree though. Anyone else think Gnome 3 (design concept and all) would actually be pretty decent, if reasonable decisions were made regarding the options they ship with?

[chithanh]

I don't think you understand what a 'customer' is. All unsatisfied Fedora 18 customers are, of course, entitled to all their money back.

Strawman. Of course Red Hat is not a charity which develops Fedora for the benefit of mankind.

Because there's a whole lot of other work in F18 that needs to get out, and a whole lot of F19 work that needs to get started. The installer is just an installer, it's not everything.

Why did we not wait until the Fedora 18 installer was perfect before releasing it? Answer: because Fedora 18 is not just the installer. Making it perfect would have been several more months of development time, during all of which, work on F19 would be held up to some degree and all the other stuff in F18 would not be reaching our user base.

I agree that the criticism that some people have voiced on Fedora 18 is too harsh, and that lots of people worked very hard to improve the release in many areas. That makes it even more sad to see their work overshadowed by that turd of an installer. I have very little insight into the development process, but it appears to me that there was no proper backup plan in place so the only choice was to push out the release:

• Fedora 17 had an installer that worked just fine. So you could have continued to use that, and optionally provide your new installer to those who want to test it.
• You could have recommended users to ditch the installer altogether and link to a document instead which describes manual partitioning + febootstrap as the preferred install method (Gentoo does it like this, and Arch has recently adopted this way too).
• You could have labeled Fedora 18 as "Forever Beta" and not make it an official release, just something for the interested.

Any of these steps would possibly have led to a lot fewer disappointed users than what we are seeing now.

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.

If that was your plan, then it is not panning out. At least the user mentioned in the article does not stay with Fedora 17. He does not wait for Fedora 19 or 20. He runs Ubuntu now.

[Vim_User]

What I wrote was a perfectly genuine reply to a reasonable question. Why did we not wait until the Fedora 18 installer was perfect before releasing it? Answer: because Fedora 18 is not just the installer. Making it perfect would have been several more months of development time, during all of which, work on F19 would be held up to some degree and all the other stuff in F18 would not be reaching our user base.

Why was shipping F18 with the old installer not an option?

[Vim_User]

Someone in this thread complained about a logout feature missing (there is a lock screen feature for that, incase you suffer from alzheimer)

In case you are suffering from Alzheimer, there are valid reasons to logout on a single user machine, mentioned in this thread (using the lock screen feature will for example not update the environment about the groups your user is in).

[disi]

It's not less unstable than Ubuntu though, minus the fact they have no LTS version.
Oh yes, it is.

Oh yes, it is.

So it is more stable you meant?

[pingufunkybeat]

Now Alan Cox has left the Linux developer community:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/0...ux-development

See what you did Fedora? You drove him to Ubuntu, and he couldn't take it for very long! Now he's gone.

[BO$$]

Now Alan Cox has left the Linux developer community:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/0...ux-development

See what you did Fedora? You drove him to Ubuntu, and he couldn't take it for very long! Now he's gone.

Hahaha! See guys? Your stupid decisions tire people. All these little shits like executing a cmd line to bring back the log out and all those issues with the installer simply tire people. You make so many bad decisions that sometimes it's easier to go back to windows. It has its issues but works. Fedora keeps changing stuff and you always learn new stuff just to be able to do what you were able to do a version ago.

Every time I install a new linux I have to go to forums learn where the stuff is, how they changed the names of the programs, learn a new interface, learn my way around bugs, report 20 bugs, start a new discussion on the bug thread trying to convince the developers to bring back a functionality that they removed because they decided to, try to make the drivers work especially the open source graphics drivers, complain about the performance that is worse since they're writing everything in python these days etc etc.... It's tiring. I don't remember windows being such a PITA. Nothing ever fucking works in linux even though you always make it sound like the promised land. You, the devs, are living in a dream world.

[V!NCENT]

In case you are suffering from Alzheimer, there are valid reasons to logout on a single user machine, mentioned in this thread (using the lock screen feature will for example not update the environment about the groups your user is in).

Alzheimer patients usually live in the past, right?:

Adding your user to groups (sys, disk, lp, network, video, audio, optical, storage, scanner, power, etc.) is not necessary for most use cases with systemd. The groups can even cause some functionality to break. For example, the audio group will break fast user switching and allows applications to block software mixing. Every PAM login provides a logind session, which for a local session will give you permissions via POSIX ACLs on audio/video devices, and allow certain operations like mounting removable storage via udisks.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd

[Pallidus]

this is coming from someone that used and liked fedora 17:


fedora 18 is not only the worse fedora release to date, it's also a broken distro that should have never been released.



The writing was on the wall and when, month after month after month, they noticed how broke everything was THEY SHOULD HAVE SIMPLY DELAYED OR CANCELLED fedora 18


jump straight to 19 or release 18 in 19's date....



Alan Cox wasn't the only one jumping to ubuntu


hell even the alpha right now is 238912833 times more stable than fedora 18

[AdamW]

Upgraded with fedup, no problems. Using LUKS, did not run into problems. It's odd there would be problems since it mostly does a package upgrade. OTOH, proprietary drivers are always problems on Fedora, I would recommend another OS distribution (called Windows 7) if you really insist on using some.

Did not use the installer, which doesn't look that good right now, not quite polished yet. Hopefully F19 will fix that.

The amount of childish whining here is always simply amazing, love the never ending G3 rants (while actually G3 is very good, if you want a bad "new" desktop, you should look at W8 instead)

The trickiness in dealing with encrypted upgrades comes at the point where fedup reboots into the actual upgrade process - it's a sort of custom init, and we need to make sure it unlocks all encrypted volumes that contain stuff the upgrade process may need to touch. We tested this in the single-encrypted-volume cases (there's several, depends exactly what is encrypted exactly how) and got quite a few bugs fixed, but it does look like there are some multiple-encrypted-volume cases that have problems, unfortunately.