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

[V!NCENT]

Oh man! Writing five symbols is just so difficult! Especially since there are few tasks where you need extra privileges in rapid succession, anyway.

I remember sudo being 'invented' for people who have difficulty remembering that they are going to do something as root.

Since I can remember having logged in as root, and even get reminded by "#" before every command I type, I find it to be absolutely useless to remind myself of something I haven't forgotten, since I would type sudo in the first place, so I haven't forgot (can you see why this is batshit retarted?), by having to type the same five characters in front of every fscking root command that's not doing anything by itself at all...

And while we are at it, let's change any short command into something like "remove -allMyFuckingFilesFromDirectory root", so people can't accidently type "#rm -rf". So much more idiot friendly!

[pingufunkybeat]

Stable API/ABI? Are you out of your mind? I guess either you are batsh*t crazy or you don't understand what ABI/APIs are.

Linux is a kernel.

He is talking about the kernel, and you are talking about bonobo and libzip. That makes no sense.

Kernel-userspace interfaces of linux are indeed very stable and rarely change. Otherwise you would have to recompile all your software every time you upgrade the kernel.

[birdie]

Linux is a kernel.

He is talking about the kernel, and you are talking about bonobo and libzip. That makes no sense.

Kernel-userspace interfaces of linux are indeed very stable and rarely change. Otherwise you would have to recompile all your software every time you upgrade the kernel.

Firstly, don't stand up for him, he didn't mention the kernel at all.

Secondly, userspace APIs in the kernel do change and change quite often - for the past ten years a very big number of /proc files have been removed or obsoleted, you cannot run old glibc on top of new kernels, etc., etc., etc.

Thirdly, stop talking of Linux as only the kernel. It's never been true - Linux is meant to be the kernel plus GNU user space applications.

[BO$$]

If that was the only thing you got out of his post you clearly were not reading it well enough.



They do test their code on different machines. That is why they put out Alphas and Betas. That is why AdamW actually does work for QA. But even that will only cover a small fraction of the machines the system is likely to be ran on.



I somehow doubt that this was done completely from the ground up, but even if it was, they posted a very lengthy and reasonable rationale as to why this was necessary and followed a very strict and cohesive road-map. It was not like, as you assert, some kid came in and brashly claimed they could do this better. That kid sounds a bit like you though.



I thought it was explained that it was because of the way that the old Anaconda used it's interfaces that it became problematic to maintain. Maybe I got that impression because I actually went through all of his posts?

BO$$ - always grabbing on to one easily demonstrated false assumption and running with it.

Yes they did post a very lengthy and reasonable rationale. Exactly the kind of justification needed for a bad decision. Look at us, we thought it out, you can't say we made a rash decision, we covered our asses. Every time somebody wants to do a rewrite they have a very lengthy and reasonable rationale. That is the problem. It's called rationalization. You already made the decision and now you justify. Read that joelonsoftware post about rewriting the application from ground up. He is right. You always look at your code and think of it as an unmaintainable mess that needs to be thrown out. But you have to resist writing a very lengthy and reasonable rationale to justify the rewrite. Write a good API so that when somebody changes something you don't break everything.

[Hibbelharry]

As an Ubuntu user I wanted to give Fedora another try on one of my machines. I think it's always good to see what other do better or worse. In the past rpm has gotten me far away from Fedora each time i had to fiddle with it, but i thought they might deliver a better Gnome 3 Experience than Ubuntu.

I prepared an USB-Stick with F18 on it and tried to boot into Live-Mode. Whenever i tried this, I got stuck at the loginscreen with no user available to login. I found a bug report about Login Problems and that people have just to click on "liveuser" to login, but there wasn't even a choice. When i enter that username manually, i get another stupid error (different from bad login/password). This happens on 3 of 4 different machines i tested with different USB Sticks. The only computer which successfully booted into the Live Environment bailed out in anaconda. All of those PC are running Ubuntu successfully.

After this experience i think F18 is seriously absolute crap and while beeing late for a while still seems like a rushed out and unusable release.I personally won't touch Fedora again for the next year and I guess Alan Cox is totally right.

[BO$$]

As an Ubuntu user I wanted to give Fedora another try on one of my machines. I think it's always good to see what other do better or worse. In the past rpm has gotten me far away from Fedora each time i had to fiddle with it, but i thought they might deliver a better Gnome 3 Experience than Ubuntu.

I prepared an USB-Stick with F18 on it and tried to boot into Live-Mode. Whenever i tried this, I got stuck at the loginscreen with no user available to login. I found a bug report about Login Problems and that people have just to click on "liveuser" to login, but there wasn't even a choice. When i enter that username manually, i get another stupid error (different from bad login/password). This happens on 3 of 4 different machines i tested with different USB Sticks. The only computer which successfully booted into the Live Environment bailed out in anaconda. All of those PC are running Ubuntu successfully.

After this experience i think F18 is seriously absolute crap and while beeing late for a while still seems like a rushed out and unusable release.I personally won't touch Fedora again for the next year and I guess Alan Cox is totally right.

Embrace the opportunity to learn more about coding! Fix it yourself! Enjoy the learning experience! Why were you expecting this to work? This is linux, where only low level coders survive!

[JanC]

And I agree with him on the orange color. It's horrible. I seriously don't know what Ubuntu's design team was thinking.

The amount of orange in Ubuntu/Unity is fairly limited, but in any case it's way better than blue...

(And obviously, colours are a personal thing...)

[JanC]

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.

That sounds like a decision made by a developer/designer who never talks to real world users and their use cases...

[JanC]

- 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.

You could also change your terminal emulator config instead of changing to a different terminal emulator...

(Also, could you explain why this breaks digital unix?)

[finalzone]

That sounds like a decision made by a developer/designer who never talks to real world users and their use cases...

From post #140

Let's be clear: most normal users out there don't set up a workstation as a file server, nor do they install multiple desktop environments on their computer. A good percentage of us do that _because we are a niche of tech-savy users with different needs and skills_. But if you design for the mainstream users, then you have to choose your defaults and behaviour in a way that makes sense for them, not for your current actual niche.
How many real users do you know that had a reason to log out in a single user single - single session case but were unable to set the needed gsetting? Because I know nobody that wasn't already looking for a reason to NERDRAGE about Red Hat conspiracies and "dumbing down of interfaces" and that had real trouble with this issue.