Fedora 18 Installer: Counterintuitive and Confusing?

An anonymous reader writes "Igor Ljubuncic, former physicist and current IT Systems Programmer and blogger, reviews Fedora 18 with its new installer. In his role as alter ego Dedoimedo, the self proclaimed 'king of everything', Igor's Linux distro and DE reviews are often wry and biting and this review is no exception: 'You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe. In all my life testing Linux and other operating systems, I have never ever seen an installer that is so counter-intuitive, dangerous and useless, all at the same time.'" The non-linear installer interface does look like kind of confusing, at least from the screenshots posted.

I must agree

[Omnifarious]

I am also extremely disappointed in this Fedora release. The installer is confusing and exhibits seemingly random behavior. I was so overjoyed I managed to get it to install it the way I wanted just once on a VM that I went and tried to install in a number of other places. No go.

And after you install, a lot of things are kind of buggy and seemingly incomplete.

Of course, since the installer didn't really work at all until you got to release candidate 4 or so, I can't really expect any other part of the system to have been decently tested.

This is a horrible release and should be skipped. If Fedora continues to go in this direction, I will have to abandon it, despite the fact that the only other decent alternative is Ubuntu, and I despise it. I've been an RH/Fedora user since 1999 or so.

fedup

[Anonymous Coward]

worked great for me.(It upgraded from Fedora 17 to 18)

Try OpenSuSE!

[Negroponte J. Rabit]

A beta of Fedora 18's installer completely wiped my hard drive. I told it to partition the drive. It partitioned it, installed Linux fine, and ALSO formatted every NTFS partition to a fresh EXT4. Even for a beta, this is a sign there's something seriously wrong. After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional. Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit. The delta-compressed updates is a huge deal for me, but also the general speed of the tools. OpenSuSE's zypper tool also gives a bit of freedom in installing 'unmatched' later versions of libs but if things go wrong, it's easy to trace and downgrade. Also, the package management tools integrate with btrfs snapshots and there's a powerful tool called 'snapper' which gives you quick access to rollback or version diffs.

Re:I must agree

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Just no. It's perfectly fine to have an opinion, even a bad opinion, and not doing anything past the expression of the opinion.

Absolutely agree here.

It's not his job to fix Fedora. It's not the job of the users to fix Fedora.

True.

It's the job of the team working on it.

Do you think this works just like a team in a corporation where tasks are assigned to them by a central authority?

 

If someone wants to contribute, good for them, but to each their own.

That's the makeup of the team working on it. Even the corporate-contributed and corporate-maintained Open Source code is no more or less usable to said corporations than it is to anyone else. The individual contributor who writes code in his spare time is on level ground with them. None of them have an obligation to participate.

The whole "It's open source, so fix it yourself and shut up" is getting really old.

No one said that. Other than you.

To note a qualitative difference between people who complain because they dislike something and people who contribute because they think they have a better idea, well that's an opinion too. See how that works?

Re:Or submit a patch or two

[Jesus_666]

And when you can't write a patch (for example because you're unfamiliar with the codebase and/or languare or aren't a programmer), complain constructively. If possible this means writing a detailes bug report. If you can't do that you'll have to find some other way to get the devs' attention without becoming rude.

Case in point: I'm not a C++ developer and entirely unfamiliar with the Chrome codebase but I found and reported a rendering bug in Chrome. The devs agreed that it was a bug and it's been fixed in the trunk recently.

Long-time Linux user here.

[neiras]

Did a fresh F18 install on my laptop this past week.

I have to agree with a lot of the criticism of the new installer, and particularly the user interface for disk partitioning. I've been running Linux since the late 90s and I don't think I've ever been confused by a partition editor, from fdisk on up - until now.

I mean, the error message I got was "Not enough disk space to create a mountpoint". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!? And this while trying to get the thing to recognize my existing /home partition.

It's like someone who has never partitioned a disk before created a really bad abstract model of the process and then based the whole user interface off of their grand concept. In the process of trying to make things easy they made it hard for anyone who knows what they are doing to be specific about what should be done. A liberal sprinkling of incorrectly-used disk partitioning terms makes for a real perfect storm of confusion.

Once I got things installed, I had no problems at all. I hope to never feel that "oh shit, I hope I haven't just blown my /home away" thrill ever again though.