Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora 548
loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.
What is vibrant about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
Fedora (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem Red Hat has had is not that Fedora is slow on the bleeding edge, but the group seems to be ignoring user request for simple feature fixes [citing a 6 month release schedule]. On the other hand by distancing themselves form free (as in beer) distros, RH has begun making money and gaining mindshare in the business world. RH can loose all they want in the desktop end, but as long as they keep the workstaion/support contract end alive and well they will continue to make money.
Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
rubber baby buggy bumper (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate RedHat's distro version upgrade path. Live upgrades are much easier now with yum, but it can still be difficult. Usually much has changed, requiring some packages to be manually upgraded and others forced.
They should get rid of the distro versions all together, no more Fedora Core 1, 2, or 3, just Fedora. I don't see why they can't just push out new packages and make a refresher set of cd images every 6 months or so. Then new installations won't require 600mb of patches right off the bat and everyone will always be and stay current when they update with yum. No more downtime with inter-distro cd or botched live upgrades.
It's been years since I switched from RedHat to Debian at home and although there have been improvements, it's still nowhere near Debian's wonderful system.
If there's one thing I will always regret, it's going with RedHat way back when. Pain in the frick.
Re:Problem with Fedora and Linux in General (Score:5, Insightful)
The trend towards Linux systems has been steadily going up, never down, and there's no sign of slow down.
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the
Re: No supported upgrade path... (Score:3, Insightful)
I ran Fedora for a while. It was OK. But then another Fedora release came out, and there was no supported upgrade path--you had to reinstall again from scratch from a CD.
Well, I used to have to reinstall from scratch every six months when I ran Windows. That's why I switched to Linux. I want to install from scratch from CD exactly once, barring disk failure, and then have updates flow down automatically.
So now I run Debian and Gentoo. If RedHat want to get me running Fedora, they'll have to fix the upgrade problem. Getting rid of RPM would be a good start.
Re:While we're fantasizing ... (Score:2, Insightful)
If they wanna support the community... (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh, I had already moved to Mandrake.... (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO, the only reason to run RedHat is because a particular proprietary vendor (such as, say, Oracle) supports only RH with their proprietary app.
I think it was deeply stupid for RH to drop their power-user distros, and Fedora was never a legit substitute. Methinks RH's strategies gave SuSE a golden opportunity to expand in the US market, and probably prompted Novell to buy SuSE.
The next set of infrastructure servers that need to run any kind of proprietaryware, I'm probably going to be recommending SuSE/Novell..
Re: No supported upgrade path... (Score:5, Insightful)
On other systems I've even done upgrades on Fedora Core with YUM.
Also, please tell me what's wrong with RPM. Don't bring apt-get into this, cause RPM isn't a repository installer. If you want to talk software repository based install, you need to compare dpkg to RPM, and apt-get to YUM.
I'm tired of people saying RPM sucks, and then comparing RPM to apt-get. I know, it's the "cool thing" to make fun of RPM.
Late Adopter/Former Supporter (Score:2, Insightful)
I felt alienated by their decisions; stability is important to me, but as our customers demand more features we need the updates to the kernels, the newer software packages, the newest hardware support. I was willing to pay to stay on the cutting edge, but unwilling to pay for stagnation.
I'm currently happy with Fedora Core 3 and am glad that Red Hat is supporting that project. They originally had to earn my support and respect and I hope I can trust them with that again in the future.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Fedora (Score:3, Insightful)
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fedora is a big fat beta-testing project. The latest and greatest from RH will always show up in Fedora first, get knocked around by a few thousand users, then get put into the next release of RHEL if it survives/stabilizes/works-well-with-others. Fedora is the big "give-back", or don't you get it?
It is a pattern: three releases of Fedora every 6 months or so, then a RHEL (which is basically an approved version of the last Fedora standing). Rinse. Repeat.
Re:FUD? (Score:1, Insightful)
one would expect that winning community trust would not be done through FUD, thus making this ironic [unlike, say, 'rain on your wedding day'].
We dont need a vibrant Fedora. (Score:5, Insightful)
We dont need a stripped down, rebranded disro "here this is for you" linux. Just something that will play with all the redhat-certified software and apps out there.
Non-starter (Score:3, Insightful)
With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.
Re:Redhat lost opensource developer support... (Score:5, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Penitence? (Score:5, Insightful)
golf clap for Red Hat (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
Re:Questions for Red Hat customers... (Score:3, Insightful)
be trusted to continue support of their (largely
orphaned) client OS. Because of that lack of
trust, I have abandoned any thought of using their
server (RHEL) product, also. When the wool was
pulled off from my eyes, other linux distributions
that can be used as both client & server, and can
use a generic kernel, stated to make more sense.
Given the improved stability, why go back?
I love Fedora (Score:3, Insightful)
I really appreciate the effort that a lot of folks put into Fedora. In fact, I think I started testing it out around FC1 test1. Everything works great here.. on multiple boxes. And if I need help..since I live on freenode, I can ask in #fedora ...generally nice folks.
Look all flames aside. I've been using Linux for my workstations, home, etc, for 6 years, and Fedora has never let me down.
Mod this how you see fit. Peace
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more then a name change.
With RH9, at least I didn't have to risk a system overhaul every couple of months. Updates came out regularly, and I could upgrade RPMs as needed or required.
Fedora is a moving target, and you're lucky to get any sort of help if you don't follow the upgrade cycle closely. Found a bug in FC1? Tough, FC1 is no longer supported, maybe it was fixed in FC2. And don't bug us if FC2 introduces incompatabilities that weren't present in FC1, because we're working on the up-and-coming FC3.
And I tried RHEL, and due to several major bugs and problems with support, I can't say that it's worth the price. RH Support told me to ask for help in the Fedora forums several times. I expect more help when I pay for support.
From Inside Red Hat: Fedora *IS* Red Hat Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
-Seth
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The short version: inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different. As engineers we're doing the same old stuff we've always been doing. We work on fedora deadlines, we polish and stabilize fedora releases, etc. To us, Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Now if you want somebody to feed you marketing spiel, you're not going to get that for Fedora, but most people here never needed that aspect of RHL
Just like RH Linux releases, some are better than others. Red Hat has often been the distro pushing forward large architectural changes (like the NPTL stuff, or more recently SELinux) that make Linux better, which is largely the reason for this variance. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs, *grin*.
I think FC3 is a really good release, personally (compared to FC2, for sure, which sucked). *shrug*
-Seth
Re:Redhat Fedora Rant (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's see: what happens if one of your servers dies? It could be fire, it could be a motherboard failure, it could be anything.
How are you meant to re-install RHEL4? The same way you re-install for disaster recovery. Because you have such a plan in place, don't you?
You talk about ENTERPRISE. Well, enterprise to me is not just on the vendor side. It's on the customer side as well. Reinstalling any RedHat-based system doesn't take much if you use kickstarting. RH provides plenty of documentation and hosts an extremely useful mailing list for that. If you are not taking advantage of Kickstart, it is nothing but your fault.
Enterprise users are ready for the worst. They have disaster recovery plans, they do drills, they plan for increased availability through some redundancy, they perform rolling updates. Do you do all of that? I'm sorry, but throwing a lot of money at Red Hat or anyone else won't automatically make you "enterprise".
That said, I am not convinced that a transition will be that fatal. You severely underestimate the effort involved in "managing things like config files changing", but still I doubt you'll have anything that can't be solved with a little manual work - ask them for help, if it still doesn't work.
Then there are arguments for a clean reinstall. RHEL4, for example, will format ext3 partitions using the htree extensions, which speed up considerably performance when directories have a large number of files. You could do almost the same thing on an existing filesytem, but you need to unmount it, set the dir_index option and run a fsck with the -fD switches.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Redhat lost community goodwill (Score:5, Insightful)
Pft. I wish all the people posting crap like this could see inside Red Hat. Virtually all of our engineering work (with the exception of some dedicated people doing backporting of features as per enterprise requests for RHEL... e.g. the reason why RHEL3 already had the most desireable kernel 2.6 features despite being 2.4 based) goes into Fedora (and before that Red Hat Linux). It always has. It always will.
As always, Red Hat continues to increase its engineering resources. Far far more work goes into a current Fedora Core release than ever went into a Red Hat Linux release.
There was never a magic change of heart when we realized we were deserting the Linux community. There was a tragic, stupid, and avoidable communications fuckup. We probably should have renamed RHL -> Fedora at a different point than RHEL appeared. But anyway, Fedora isn't and never has been abandonware, or our "second best effort".
Ironically, one of the things Red Hat, as a company, has been bad at is pimping itself to the community. We do tons of the "shit work" that keeps Linux going (who do you think pays for most of glibc, gdb, gcc, a huge chunk of the boring work in gnome, lots of upstream kernel work, etc etc) but fail marketing our efforts to get m4d pr0pz. Red Hat engineering has always prided itself on doing most of its work upstream instead of maintaining large patch sets in-distro (which most companies haven't done, and still don't do). The day we don't, you'll hear Alan Cox screaming from inside Red Hat
-Seth
Re:Problem with Fedora and Linux in General (Score:4, Insightful)
And for some reason, human nature will radically alter and the Linux IT world won't be filled with underqualified people hoping to make a buck too?
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
*nod*, I fully agree that dropping the boxed in-stores in-front-of-peoples-eyes version has been detrimental to awareness of RH (and Linux in general). It was profitable because when you have boxes in all the hundreds of thousands of stores, enough people do random buys (to see what all this linux stuff is about, etc) that even though the hit rate is small, you make real money off it.
The problem was all this better-than-free advertising also wasn't resulting in a lot of people using Linux. Home users who buy Linux in the store, by and large, end up running Windows at the end of the day. When you compound this with the versions in stores often being very old (and creating bad impressions of where Linux stands today...)...
I agree we'd be better off still marketing to home / small business users than ignoring them completely. But in terms of moving Linux from "something that sells because people are curious" to "something that sells because its important and useful to people", Linux has a lot more to offer enterprise customers right now. We want to be selling a product because its useful to people, not because its the latest craze!
RH's never been splashy about desktop, but we've always had a dedicated team working on it (from the early days of GNOME on...), and that team is currently fairly large by RH standards, more than 25 engineers. We've been notoriously bad at hyping our work, but we are doing lots of cool stuff
-Seth
Hyperbole is your friend (Score:2, Insightful)
It's more like every 6 months, and if you have to manage too many machines for that to be comfortable, maybe a free OS isn't right for you.
"RedHat died the day up2date stopped working for free."
It's still free in Fedora Core.
"...with up2date replaced by yum."
"Please do what you can to support CentOS, as this is what RedHat was for all of us since what, Version 3.x?"
As someone who's used every release since 2.0, this is really perplexing. RHL was always a low-cost system with a high amount of potential for getting things done. I tended to buy the major releases as a show of support but otherwise downloaded the images for expediency. It was always at least in my interest to keep up with releases--most of the software I cared about was either included, written by myself, or written by others who also kept up with RHL releases. Being that they were 6 or so months apart as well, I know I've lost very little, if anything, in the transition to Fedora Core. All that's been lost is the cachet that the name Red Hat brought to the distribution--the bits are the same, and for right now the people assembling it are the same.
You seem quite focused on the cost of full support being unacceptable above everything else.
And "Red Hat" IS TWO WORDS.
Bad things started earlier, with RH8/9 (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that RH8&9 were in no way comparable to the RH 5.X, 6.X & 7.X i used before:
- i was accustomed to the ".0 is shitty, but
- why the hell did they choose YUM ? this thing was a big load of sh**. the only first useable version of YUM is the new 2.1 lines. to me it really looks like the NIH syndrom (well, ok, it was yellow dog's system, but the development changed at all with the involvment of RH). so i know there were arch support problems with APT, but they could have helped the APT guys with that. and of course there's also URPMI, that works great too.
- support, combined with no "online upgrade path" through, precisely, YUM. this is big issue. you have to download and burn CD every time. it just plain sucks (on a sidenote, i live in France, where bandwidth costs nothing, but CDs/DVDs are quite expensive because of an (in)famous tax for "protecting" musicians). and anyway, there are a lot of machines i do not want to upgrade every 6 months or so. i tried to go fedoralegacy for a while, on a 7.3, but the updates are coming slow, and while it could be ok for a desktop or even server behind a good firewall, for non-critical jobs, i'd never recommend it as firewall or mission-critical internet server.
- the price for RHEL. it's madly expensive. unaffordable for a home user or a small company.
so now i don't use any RHEL/FC. i have debians[2], a mandrake, few WBELs, and even an OSX. and i won't go back.
[1] i don't know what they did with these patches, but in FC2, around 2.6.8, they introduced something that just prevented my old loki games from working. this being a wife's requirement, i had no choice but using a 2.6.7, and then changed to Mandrake, on which everything works like a breezes, despite its 2.6.10.
[2] actually Debian isn't very much a better option. these guys f*cked up their distro as well. now hardcore geeks prefer gentoo, and for most "normal" users/geeks, their stable is just too old. didn't try any Debian-based distro, though, but heard some were great.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Install Oracle 8i, Lotus Domino or SAS on RHEL, then on Fedora. Let me know if you still think they are the same.
I was at FUDCon, too. The major complaint was no contribution method for non-RH employees. No one has access to submit to the CVS server(s?). The problem itself is easily fixed, but the decisions that led to the problem were iffy at best:
Let's:
- Make a distro of completely free software.
- Protect Red Hat from lawsuits by not supporting mp3s.
- Make no accomodation for other people to offer extras that integrate into fedora's yum dowload process.
You don't just need to open Fedora Core to accept submissions from people like Eric Raymond, you need to have an easy method for other people to maintain the parts of a complete distro that your company doesn't have the balls to.
Fedora Core maintained internally? Fine. Fedora Extras only open (someday) to celebrity contributors? Fine. Now put in a templating system for people to plug in layers 3, 4 and 5 on their own websites so the end user can just drop yum-livna.conf into the repos directory and move on with making a useable OS.
Eric had it right. YOU need to come to US, not the other way around.
Ubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
I anyone out there using the pre-releases of Hoary? Are they usable yet?
Thank You! Here is what one customer wants (Score:4, Insightful)
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
Re:Redhat lost community goodwill (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please, that is such wank. The guy said that for some people who have apps or hardware not compatible with Linux, they should use Windows instead. Guess what? I agree with him! People who point out the obvious truth that Linux does not work out of the box for most people are not heretics, they're just being rational.
I still can't walk into a random computer store, as far as I know, and buy a $20 boxed DVD with any kind of Red Hat Linux on it. This is bad.
Why is it bad? You can download it for free. Given the huge costs involved with setting up boxed sales I'm not surprised they dropped it. Not many people buy operating systems in boxes.
more importantly, we could always recommend the latest bits to newbies without any download hassle.
If you were doing that you were being irresponsible. The volume of updates that all major distributions push today means it's not feasable to use Linux on dialup and stay secure at the same time.
But incremental breakage is just a lot easier to manage.
Not to most people. Most people want to be able to read a review of the next Fedora, see "it breaks stuff" and avoid it until they iron out the problems. They don't want to do an apt-get upgrade and find a few hours later they've been locked out of their system by a busted PAM upgrade.
Re:Thank You! Here is what one customer wants (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop the war with Sun. You may be gaining marketshare away from Sun, but you are gaining far more from Microsoft. Sun is a competitor with a small fraction of the total I.T. world. You could crush them out and still only have s small fraction of the I.T. world. Yet you could gain say 10% of Microsofts world and be much larger than Sun.
Next on that same topic. Start shipping Suns JVM + Tomcat with your systems. Set us the system so a Java developer can hit the ground running. Also allow us the way SuSE does to get the Nvidia drivers and other things that we have to agree to a license to. I can't tell you how nice it was to see all that with SuSE (JVM, Tomcat, Java) and wonder why the RedHat guys kept telling me they "couldn't" do it. It now appears that they didn't want to do it, not that they couldn't do it.
So in short. Sun is ok, Microsoft is your enemy. We need a way during the install or update to get proprietary software loaded if required by us (the client).
Re:Welcome to CentOS and RHEL alternatives. (Score:2, Insightful)
If everyone should starting to use CentOS instead of RHEL, RH (the company) will die. Someone has to pay the bills. I believe this will have it's impact on both CentOS and Fedora. Because they both need RH.
The Fedora Project would be a car without engine.
We would have to master our Fedora boxes as a Fred Flintstone.
A distribution just have to fit the needs you have.
If you're quite a self supporting linux freak, CentOS will do.
I dont use RHEL, but I hope they deliver a good support. That's what it's all about.
Preserve stability in all domains.
About updating: You can't perform a kernel update without rebooting, even not using yum or apt-get.
So, you could as well update using CD when it's necessary.
Alternatives are welcome, in case they perform better or give RH a drive to perform better.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Red hat used to provide a vibrant linux distro that was good for use on servers - enterprise level servers used to use RedHat 7.3 and the like. It was a good distro; anything you needed you could find on redhat's site or on rpmfind.net, and it was ubiquitious as "the" linux distro. If there was a binary package release for a linux version of some software, it was released for redhat, as an RPM. And it was free, or at least not expensive, as a boxed set. The life cycle was usually 12-15 months between versions (in 2 years, we went from 7.0 - 7.3).
Now, they've ditched that. Fedora is a piece of crap, and gets upgraded every 2 months. Patches aren't released with any regularity or any expected quickness. Incompatabilities between software packages on the same release are never addressed. If you want help, go screw yourself. But Fedora is their beta testing for their enterprise linux. So they give out a piece of crap distro that is never really supported in order that all the suckers do their beta testing for them.
THEN they turn around and sully the name of linux with their enterprise linux product. It's not any better than the old linux distros used to be, but it's ABSURDLY expensive. TWICE as expensive as windows for the same application. The WORKSTATION version costs $180, and that's with no support - just download, install, and good luck, buddy!. The CHEAPEST server version is $379, and that comes with no support, and only supports a limited number of users. If you want phone tech support, guess what... You're paying thousands and thousands of dollars.
Now, couple that with the fact that RED HAT DIDN'T WRITE 95% OF THEIR DISTRO. They're selling software that someone else wrote, and they've put together a desktop and a couple of apps for server administration and updating packages. That's it. For all they're worth, at least Microsoft wrote almost all of windows.
This is the crap that lets Microsoft say that their TCO is lower - RedHat's obsession with charging as much as possible for software that they didn't write and screwing the good name of linux.
Fuck redhat.
Fedora needs to slow down and get support (Score:3, Insightful)
None of the ones I've tried (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian) are really any better (some things work better and some worse) and their yum/rpm combination works really well now. I find that in general Fedora is pretty much the usable latest-and-greatest, usually in need of some debugging but with versionning present. Right now it's udev, SE-linux, making USB work right and other assorted bits.
Fedora is still 100% Free, which isn't true for many other distro, and they push both Gnome and KDE, trying to make them work better together, which is the right approach. Under which other distro would you get Inkscape (gnome vector drawing app) and Scribus (kde DTP app) working so well together ?
Myself I would be happy to play the debugger to some extent, in exchange for functionality and responsiveness to problems. So far I found that it is possible to get stuck for long on little problems (for me it was syncing problems with my Zire 71, a recurring nightmare. No sooner was it fixed that a new release made it impossible again). The RH engineers are pretty good at giving an answer, but not so great at fixing the problems in the current distros.
What RH needs to do is slow down the pace of Fedora just a bit and maintain the distro they do have instead of replying things like "wait for FC(n+1), it will be fixed then". Right now this is the stock answer if things get sticky and this is not really acceptable.
Perhaps instead of forcing a new distro down the throat of users every 4-6 months they should move to a 9-month schedule which would insure people would only have to upgrade every 18 months or so, instead of every year right now (FC releases are only supported for 2 releases by RH, and legacy support hasn't really kicked in). Either that or they should support 3 releases at the same time instead of only 2.
I've found that by the time the distro is abandonned by RH it has only been running well enough for a few short months, and that if you want to move to a distro which will be supported for a while you have to move *two* distributions ahead (i.e FC1 to FC3), which is a bit risky, as RH makes significant changes along the way. Packages disappear, new ones come in their place (or not). You have to relearn how your distro works in non-trivial ways and you don't have much time to learn.
This is a poor way to reward all the users who've been doing all the free debugging for them, I reckon.
On the other hand it is very nice to see the pace of (positive) change in Linux. There is simply no comparison in functionality between RH9 and FC3.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:2, Insightful)
"But you don't get paid for beta-testing other versions of Linux, either!" True, but we also get the finished product. Think of it like this: You can download a free version of a very buggy operating system. You send in fixes, the company says thanks, and then puts them into an OS you have to buy. Talk about thankless.
Re:From Inside Red Hat: Fedora *IS* Red Hat Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Not true at all. We migrated all of our production servers from RH9 straight to FC1 and then to FC2 and only saw performance and stability increase. I did the same on my home workstation, and only saw performance and stability increase. The Fedora kernels are stock 2.6 with some small additions, plus the Alan Cox patches. Now, if I were to want to try to stabalize the 2.6 kernel, I think the first thing I would do is grab Alan's patches.
It is obvious to anyone who has actually USED Fedora (and I don't mean you installed it on your home workstation and played with it for a few hours), I mean really used it on high traffic production servers, that it is a very stable and performing distro. Sure it has its flaws, but as somone who has USED many distros, they all do.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are simply FREE QA and Beta Testers for RHEL (Score:1, Insightful)
It is you! You are the ones who are being used to QA and beta test the next version of RHEL so that they can later rebrand Fedora Core X as RHEL version X and sell it for X number of dollars. The next step is for you to start all over again with the next version of Fedora, working hard to provide free labor to Red Hat corporate.
If you really want to be part of a community distro. I mean a community where the contributions are a two way street. I would adivse you to choose another distro.
Why would anyone want to do free QA and beta testing to help Red Hat's quarterly financial reports? Red Hat should hire and pay a larger QA and beta test team for RHEL and open up a truely free community distro where people outside of Red Hat corporate can participate ans developers, maintainers, and most importantly VOTE/choose the direction of where the next set of features will be developed for the next version of Fedora.
Until then, this is not a community distro of Linux. Simply a misuse of the Free and Open Source community resources for the financial gain of one company.