OSNews Rates Fedora Core 1 Mild Disappointment

JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."

Fedora is buggy indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

The article finds me in agreement. Fedora is just too buggy for my taste. I tried it a few days ago and I also saw some of the bugs presented in the article (like the app installer not recognizing its own RPMs for the fedora CDs most notably).

Oh, well, back to Debian...

Not bad for a V1...

[DraKKon]

Although is not RedHat Linux 10, its pretty good for a v1.0 ... 1.1 or 2 should be pretty kick ass.. at least I hope..

Re:Usability Issues

[Ianoo]

Why were you trying to compile things when using a binary distribution?

Corporate Improvements!

[Lord Kano]

This is why people like me were bitching about Red hat's shift in focus.

Sure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be all but bulletproof and stable, but what about those of us who aren't using linux to displace Solaris or NT Servers?

What about those of us who want to do a little Gimping or serve our home LANs? At the risk of drawing the fire of the distro zealots, this is the precise reason why I switched to Mandrake at about the same time as RHAT's IPO.

LK

Fedora Fine for Me

[Sir Kewl]

I am using Fedora right now to write this comment. While some of the bugs mentioned in the article are valid points, I have no problems with multimedia playback, using yum and rpm.livna.org to download mplayer, xine and xmms-mp3 was quite painless. Perhaps the author should have subscribed to the fedora mailing list before he tried the distro. The RPM problem has been fixed, installation of ATI 3D drivers was painless.

I just want to give a big THANK YOU to the whole Fedora team. The release had its problems but I am happy with my setup!

No offense to Eugenia

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

But I wish there were more people writing distro reviews. OSNews seems to be one of the few sources that get any play on here, ( heck, they may be one of the few sources full stop ), and it would be nice if we could get some variety of opinion / requirements / analysis from a variety of different viewpoints.

The gaming, productivity and utility software industries have hundreds of review sites spanning all over the web, and while I recognise that individual distro releases rarely represent as big a market impact to Joe Public as, say, the latest iD game, it would be nice to see a bit more heterogeny.

Just another thought - these reviews all seem to have to rush themselves, and rarely have time to evaluate long term issues or strengths that arise after a bit of persistant use ~ an example has been the recent rave reviews in the print media of Panther, which I adore, but had several showstopper bugs in .0 which nobody seemed to pick up on until they starting munching on user preferences for breakfast.

YLFI
p.s. Worst run on sentance ever.

Use it properly.

[reaper20]

This "review" is fundamentally flawed, because I have no idea where in the release notes or Fedora FAQs it states to do what she did to this box, this reads like a whine-fest because Red Hat did not fix her favorite bugs:

a) So, the first thing she does is install a third party RPM and then wonders why it blows up in her face? How about the RPMs that came with the distribution? So, the install is brand new already broken in a VMWare installation.

b) Why is she using apt and synaptic? They don't even come with Fedora.

c) The RPM from Sun installs the JVM in all the Mozilla browser's (I didn't install KDE so I can't speak for Konqueror) and even integrates into the GNOME menu.

d) The well known limitations of Fedora's multimedia capabilities plague every linux distribution. It's not Fedora's fault that US laws suck. It's as easy to add multimedia in Fedora as it is in debian, you add one non-free source and you're done.

Here's a hint, if you're the kind of person that worries about moving from gaim .71 to .72 right after you install your distribution, then Fedora probably is not for you. Or you could wait until updated RPMs hit the official repositories instead of grabbing Joe Bob's RPM build and wondering why your installation exploded.

How will IBM deal with it if Fedora is a dud?

[darnok]

My understanding is that IBM currently recommends either SuSE or Redhat for its Linux customers, depending on where the customer is based. Given that lots of "big" customers have small offices in the boondocks, what are they going to recommend?

Small site typically equates to "we want it cheap, we want it reliable and we want it now. Even though we're part of a big company, head office says we have to keep our costs very low. If we don't we shut up shop". Once you add up lots of small sites, they actually carry a bit of clout in a large organization; you'd better be able to deliver a solution that fits their needs if you want to retain that customer. Quite often, a small site exists solely to service one big customer; global HQ wants to keep that small site happy.

Non-enterprise RedHat fit the bill perfectly for small sites, but SuSE might be too expensive given the lack of a download-only release. I'd assume IBM was hoping Fedora might be a good substitute for non-enterprise RedHat, but if not, which way will they turn?

Re:What a shock

[*SECADM]

Ars says "...After using it throughout the beta cycle, we can say that would be true if it wasn't for one small problem -- Fedora rocks. Hard." [arstechnica.com]

I don't trust Eugenia either. She seems much more obsessed with screenshots and themes than anything else(such as usability).

Preach it, brother!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Linux exclusively since 1998, and I'm on the verge of giving up on it. There, I said it.

I'm tired of the trying ordeal it is to upgrade Linux distributions. For the most part I've stuck with Red Hat, which is known as a fairly stable release. Yet every time I upgrade from one release to another, at least a dozen applications are broken.

I especially remember my attempt to go from RH7.3 to RH9. There were a number of things wrong, but the most important was that my sound driver didn't work. I found various patches, and recompiled the kernel about ten times. At last it sort of worked, but somehow it stopped recognizing my USB mouse! Combined with everything else, I abandoned it and went back to 7.3. That's a weekend of my life I will never get back.

Most recently I upgraded to Fedora, this past weekend. I had Crossover [codeweavers.com] and Real Player for Linux configured just fine before, but now neither will work. Annoying. Furthermore, the distribution "upgraded" to tetex-2.0.2, which contains a number of poorly documented changes in style behaviours. It took me a morning to figure out why; in the end I just used an old style file to make it work like before.

All I want is for it to just work. I don't want to suddenly find out that a driver is broken, or search around for six hours on Google to find a solution to some irritating problem with a package I use regularly. Until this happens Linux will not be ready for the desktop.

Linux has pissed me off for probably the last time. My next machine will almost certainly run OS X.

Regarding Redhat

[nate nice]

It's good that they are putting all their resources into the enterprise segment, specializing in servers mainly. This is where Linux needs to be. Spreading Linux (meaning resources, the people working with it) too thin at this point, between servers and desktops, is the wrong choice currently. We are in a battle with Microsoft mainly. Microsoft is the undisputed king of desktops. We need to keep making Linux the choice for server and back-office type applications as this is it's strongest position right now and the one place it really can compete with Microsoft.

Microsoft has, in essence, infinite money to put into anything it wants. It currently wants the server market, badly. If they can control this then they will can make communications propriety and fulfill their dreams of world domination, thus have a total monopoly over the desktop and server as they can make them integrate seamlessly and become the sole designer of all applications that require the server-client model and beyond.

Linux currently has a fabulous market share within servers and the fight must continue to make these numbers higher. Spending all the time and resources on desktop issues, such as ease of use just is not the fight to be in right now. It's a fight that really, at the moment or any time soon, cannot be won. The fight for servers can be won.

The developers and contributers to Linux and Linux applications should be doing everything we can to make Linux the de-facto standard on the server. It would be foolish to not recognize our great fortune with our position in the server market. This is why I think Redhat is not only making a wise business move, but also one that will help Linux in general.

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, if you have an 80 years grandma, then tuning her with cosmetics won't change her age. Same with Fedora and the rest. BlueCurve is just another theme (as there are thousand themes outside).

The theme doesn't make GNOME1 apps not using GNOME1 libraries, it doesn't make GTK1 apps not using GTK1, it doesn't make Mozilla getting rid of XUL in favor to GNOME2 or GTK2... and so on. The BlueCurve theme is just a lie to the customers.

The BlueCurve theme doesn't correct the button re-ordering in GNOME2 to be consistent with the KDE apps, Mozilla or OOo.

The entire technical framework below isn't changed with BlueCurve. I assume you have no clue otherwise you wouldn't have replied with that shit.

Fedora has some great technology

[slamb]

...whatever supposed usability problems Fedora has, there's some great new technology behind it.

For example: they've got a new and shiny version of the glibc & NPTL. This threading support is worlds better than anything I've seen in other distributions or most other operating systems. I wrote a small test [slamb.org] for C++-safe thread cancellation support. It failed on pretty much every system I tried. Only Fedora Core 1 and Tru64 passed. This is a behavior more hinted at than mandated by the pthread standard at this point, but realistically, no one would ever use thread cancellation in a C++ program if it didn't work the way it does in Fedora.

There are lots of architectural improvements like that always thrown into a new RedHat release, and I think Fedora will be no different. It leads to their problems with x.0 releases, but I think it's worth it.

In my mind, Fedora Core 1 is RedHat 10 - the name + the community. It even upgraded from my RedHat 9 installation. That's a dead give-away.

Re:They've gone elsewhere

[Hrunting]

Those of us that do file bugs with Redhat in bugzilla have learned that they rarely get addressed unless you yourself provide the solution. There are a few package managers that keep up (httpd, net-snmp), but kernel bugs? Forget about it. Perl bugs? Forget about it. You can give the most detailed bug report possible and you're still lucky if it even gets addressed.

Hell, the other day I reported a bug in anaconda that causes every single raid5 installation to be suspect to corruption, and so far, not even a reply. The most I've seen is that they added someone else's e-mail address to the bug.

Maybe it's not that no one files bugs. Maybe it's that people learned that filing bugs with RedHat was futile.

Re:They've gone elsewhere

[Nailer]

I think you've made a good point, but Fedora will go a long way to resolving that situation - particularly as Red Hat's more immediately accessable default installer and desktop appeal more to new users - its a chance to get them hooked into bug reporting and, hopefully even better, documentation (one of the areas where Linux needs the msot improvement).

Look at what's happened over the last year - besides the Fedora merger, FreshRPMs, ATRPMs, NewRPMs, and Dag have combined to ensure consistent policy across their repositories. Yellowdog is now likely to become Fedora PPC too.

Developers who work on server software in particular (according to Netcraft and IDC Red Hat dominates in this area) might also be attracted to the 6 month release cycle of Fedora versus the perpetually updating and more bleeding edge testing or unstable.

Re:They've gone elsewhere

[HiThere]

Wait for some more reports before going to Mandrake 9.2. I had some problems that caused me to switch away from it rather quickly. Possibly software updates would have fixed this, but all the mirrors appeared unuseable...and I'm a MandrakeClub member, so I have access to supposedly private servers. The synthesis files seem to be garbaged.

(Whatever, it didn't solve the problem that I was trying it for, so I'm back to LibraNet Debian... with renewed appreciation.)

OTOH, if it works on your hardware, and is fast enough for you, then go for it. It has many nice features.

Yet again, I've heard some really good things recently about Mandrake 9.1, so see if you can try that version. (Presumably this means that they've fixed the holes that the initial release has...though I don't know for certain. Certainly my initial impression of 9.1 was better than of 9.2, but I no longer remember why.)

Re:bummer

[neural cooker]

I just installed gentoo. I found it not too tough to setup when you follow the directions on their site. Can take a long time to install and it took me some effort to figure out get it all working with my hardware. It was tough at times but it was a blast! Now I feel like I have a lot more understanding of and control over the configuration of Linux than I ever did with RedHat.

I'd recommend gentoo if you've been using RedHat on a basic level for a while (like I was) and you want to take this opportunity to challenge yourself a bit and learn more about how to really start configuring Linux.

Eugenia sure has a LOT of favorite OSes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.. in this article, she says:

Red Hat's Linux is still one of my favorite distributions because of one main reason: compatibility with Linux software.

But less than two months ago, in an earlier OSNews article [osnews.com], she said:

Slackware is my new favorite operating system along with FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and Mac OS X.

Hmm, no Red Hat in sight. And she even said:

I have tried more than 10+ different Linux distributions in the past 4 years but I never stuck with any. Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE are too bloated and slow with complex internal structures (however Red Hat evolves faster of the three).

Wow, when's she going to make up her mind?