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Red Hat Software Ubuntu Linux

Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu 380

Posted by samzenpus from the no-sir-I-don't-like-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developer veteran Alan Cox has lashed out at Red Hat's recent release of Fedora 18. Cox posted comments to his Google+ page saying 'Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen.' He encountered numerous problems with Fedora 18 and then decided to switch to Ubuntu."
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Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu More

Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu

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  • forgot RH7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dltaylor ( 7510 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @06:57PM (#42675461)

    THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

    Ugly, ugly incompatibilities abounded. Even "build from source" didn't work very well, since the compiler was not really "C", or any other language.

    • Re: forgot RH7 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by xose ( 219487 )

      Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html [redhat.com]

    • Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smash ( 1351 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @08:16PM (#42676211) Homepage Journal
      Clearly you weren't around for Redhat 5.0, with the libc5->glibc fuckup.

    • Fedora Core 4 also had a fucked up compiler. You couldn't compile a kernel with it.

    • Re:forgot RH7 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @12:02AM (#42677679)

      THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

      The most egregious abuse that Red Hat has perpetrated upon the Linux community in my humble opinion - and this is hard because there are just so many candidates to choose from - but the worst of the worst in my opinion is using script files for network initialization instead of designing some sane file format as Debian did. Thou shall not excute thy data unless thou be a LISP interpreter. Red Hat guys, please stop that crap, it's the level of design competence we might expect from Microsoft.

      • Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by smash ( 1351 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @03:25AM (#42678383) Homepage Journal
        You are forgetting systemd and pulseaudio, which also introduces compatibility issues for everyone else as well, when desktop environments start requiring it.

      • To be honest, I'd be much happier if Redhat/Fedora leveraged a more Debian-like system. I mean, with systemd and all; but call apache2 apache2 instead of 'httpd' (isn't nginx httpd?), have /etc/apache2/sites-{available,enabled} and so on; /etc/default instead of /etc/sysconfig and the huge mess in there; and so on. Also apt and deb outstrip RPM and Yum in just about every way, from stability to speed to feature set; yum has all kinds of plug-ins that poorly approximate some of the basic features of apt l

  • Come on, Alan ;( (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @06:58PM (#42675469)
    They can't all be the worst!

    • Re:Come on, Alan ;( (Score:5, Funny)

      by lennier ( 44736 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:31PM (#42675809) Homepage

      They can't all be the worst!

      You might very well think that, but then you encounter the non-Euclidean badness that is Unity/Gnome3 and all sanity goes out the window.

      A million distributions, all simultaneously worse than each other is entirely possible with the way that Linux desktop development is trending at the moment.

    • They can't all be the worst!

      No, they can't, but as far as I am concerned it''s a tossup between Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.x when it comes to deciding which is more crappy. Ubuntu absolutely dies when I fire up VirtualBox and it has a legion of really annoying bugs, some of which have been around since 11.x or earlier; as for Fedora 18 the 64 bit version didn't even boot on my IBM desktop. Still searching for a Linux distro that actually does a modicum of QA...

  • People use Red Hat? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Blindman ( 36862 )
    I guess this is a big deal. I tried Red Hat a long time ago and I have never looked back. I'm just going to stick with Slackware.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The first distro I ever bought was a Red Hat 4.something in a retail box. Tried several others, including Mandrake when it appeared ('cause at the time Red Hat didn't have KDE and I wanted to try it.) Settled on Debian for a number of years, then switched to Ubuntu. Using Ubuntu now, but considering a future switch to Mint.

      • Re:People use Red Hat? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by uvajed_ekil ( 914487 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @09:45PM (#42676855)
        I'm no expert, but I think you're on the right track. Slackware lost its appeal to me a loooong time ago, Ubuntu was never really as good as I wanted it to be, and Fedora has fallen apart as of late. Tried out SUSE, CentOS and Scientific, Mandrake/Mandriva/Connectiva, Debian, and some others over the years, and I'd honestly say Mint is the best thing out there right now, at least for personal use and smaller networks. Mint's is essentially what Ubuntu was supposed to be: it works and isn't ridiculous to setup and maintain.

        If you like Ubuntu okay and are frustrated with other distros, you will probably love Mint. I've moved on to Mint's Debian Edition, which still has some unfortunate flaws, but I keep hoping they'll change their focus to the Debian base and just forget Ubuntu. I keep testing new releases when they become available, thinking maybe I'm missing something. Invariably I wipe the test partitions and sleep well knowing Mint works for me, looks how I like, does everything I ask of it, and is reliable. Of course I call this sort of testing "fun," but it reaffirms my OS choice. And BTW, I had high hopes for Fedora 18, but it is a joke.
    • "Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open source company in its fiscal year 2012, reaching $1.13 billion in annual revenue." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat [wikipedia.org] Yes, I'd say people use "Red Hat". More specifically they probably use Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or JBoss, etc.

  • Darkside (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @06:59PM (#42675487)

    Welcome Alan! We've been waiting for you.

      ONE OF US!! ONE OF US!!

    • You can not trust Canonical any more than Redhat.

      He will realize Ubuntu has problems, and he will eventually switch to Debian.

      Give him a few weeks.

      • The OP may be talking about ascension to grumpy old man status. He joins others like Senator McCain and John Stewart in raising his cane to the sky in defiance.

  • Go Arch (Score:4, Informative)

    by sphantom ( 795286 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @06:59PM (#42675489)

    After making the switch from Ubuntu to Fedora after the Unity fiasco, I recently switched from F17 to Arch due to all the delays. I couldn't be happier.

    • If you want Ubuntu without all the bullshit just use Linux Mint.

      • If you want Ubuntu without all the bullshit just use Debian.

        FTFY.

        U = D + BS_U
        LM = U - BS_U/2 + BS_LM

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        bullshit like ... support? That's fine if you are a home hobby user, but not in a corporate env. We need someone to blame.
        Redhat provides that.
        Ubuntu provides that.

        Arch, mint, debian do not - except from 3rd parties. I'm not claiming that 3rd party support is not really better, just that explaining that to management is a loosing effort.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sphantom ( 795286 )

        I actually find pacman to be a little better than apt/aptitude. Additionally, dealing with packages not in the standard repos tends to be a better experience in Arch.

        On the flip side of the coin though, Arch feels a bit like Gentoo at times in that some tasks can require a bit of manual intervention.

        Plusses and minuses to both I suppose.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nimey ( 114278 )

          A bit? I played with Arch for about six months and gave up the second time I ran into an update that broke the system because I didn't read the homepage first.

          I'll stick with Ubuntu Server if I want a fully customized barebones install. That sucks too, but not quite so strongly and I won't have to do a reinstall every time the devs want to randomly make incompatible changes.

  • Recent Linux updates... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:01PM (#42675523)
    Recent Linux distros have made me miss the days of Ubuntu 7.10 and the like, back when hardware compatibility finally caught up to Windows (wireless cards actually worked out of the box! No more messing with windows drivers in hopes you could get them to sort of work with the kernel!) and they hadn't completely broken the UI (like Gnome 3.x).

    It seems like whenever I wipe and re-upgrade a distro I end up having to take weeks to make it work the way I want it to. Although, I have to say I like it better than Windows 8...
    • IIRC, Broadcom wireless support was still a bit dodgy on Ubuntu back in the 7.10 days. There was no easy-fix install from the repos, you had to manually rip the firmware from the Windows drivers yourself with bcm43xx-fwcutter and hope it would work after the next reboot.
      • Yeah, although I was lucky and never had any Broadcom chips. I forget which brand it was that I had, but it constantly gave me trouble until 7.04 or 7.10 when it started working out of the box.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      I hope Windows doesn't end up that way with everyone always looking back wistfully on Windows 7, but I get this feeling it's gonna end up that way...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Given all the talk about up/downgrading Windows 8 ->7, I'd say we're there.

      • Its already happened. Indeed I have a feeling that XP is going to be the platform that people will get nostalgic about 10-15 years later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      It seems like whenever I wipe and re-upgrade a distro I end up having to take weeks to make it work the way I want it to. Although, I have to say I like it better than Windows 8...

      It took me about 3 hours to do a fresh install of Fedora 18 over my original Fedora 17 before I was fully operational again however i do set-up my file-systems such that I only need to reformat the operating system parts not my data. I do actually backup all my data on a regular basis however because I am careful with my file-system layout there is never a need for me to do a recovery. Of course I do my homework prior to doing an upgrade which is no different to what I do when planning any upgrade to any ma

  • Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neiras ( 723124 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:03PM (#42675541)

    Why is this news? Slashdot already covered F18's wacky installer.

    F18 is a bleeding-edge testing distribution. People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch. New things get tried in Fedora. Some of them are great; some of them are dubious. It's always been this way. This is surely not news.

    We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines; there have been zero issues. The installer was a "WTF? Oh, got it." inconvenience the first time around.

    Thanks for the kernels, AC, and you can say what you like, but people whose OS installs get screwed up tend to be louder than those for whom things just work. I wonder if he even bothered to report a bug. Probably not.

    • people whose OS installs get screwed up tend to be louder than those for whom things just work.

      Apparently not.

    • Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:31PM (#42675813)

      >> We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines

      Do you use kickstarts to automate deployment?
      On top of that, do you
      * password-protect GRUB?
      * lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation?
      * expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install?
      * require that updated packages be installed during automated installation?

      As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer. If you know workarounds, please reply! We could use your help and I'd send you a nice gift in return. :-)
      —DMW

      • I think the grub2 password protect thing is fixable - need to add --unrestricted to allow anyone to boot the entry, so it doesn't ask for a password every time. There is a bug for it with the details. Granted it should just work, but it's being tracked and should see the light of day someday... I gather from the trail of comments it is not as trivial as would be liked to fix.

        https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=840204 [redhat.com] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=853430 [redhat.com]

        On the updated packages, use c

      • Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:4, Informative)

        by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @10:13PM (#42677023) Homepage

        "As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer."

        No they are not. You may be having problems with them, in which case sorry, but it is not correct to say they are completely broken, as they are not.

        We tested kickstart installs extensively during F18 validation and they work fine. Just fine. In fact they're the part of install that has changed least since F17. It is impossible to help you with whatever problem you're seeing without any details at all, but it is definitely not the case that kickstarts are 'completely broken'.

        On "password-protect GRUB" - see the other guy's response. It is not 'completely broken'. The default behaviour of password protection changed upstream between grub1 and grub2; we are following upstream behaviour. 'Restoring' the grub1 behaviour is, as the other guy said, not as straightforward as it might seem.

        "lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation"

        This seems like an odd thing to talk about. Are you saying you want to do that but you can't? Or what? Details.

        "expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install"

        Works fine in testing.

        "require that updated packages be installed during automated installation"

        Kickstart install uses the repos you define. Define repos that include updates and updates will be installed. Don't, and they won't. It's entirely up to you. This has not changed at all between F17 and F18.

    • Arch is bleeding edge, and way more than Fedora. I've never seen broken installers or any important packages broken. Most issues in general, are upstream packages, but nothing as important as the installer.

    • Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @08:58PM (#42676535) Homepage Journal

      People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch

      General rules of thumb (assuming a normal 6-month cycle):

      A Fedora release is broken for the first 30 days. Things are rapidly fixed. Yeah, that should be beta, but too few people test. Personally, I can't have my daily work machines broken for beta, but I do install it when I'm on the previous release and developers are working on something that needs fixing that I need fixed, or when I have a spare machine I don't have to rely on.
      Months 2-5 are where most of the annoying bugs get fixed. I usually upgrade my daily use machines around month 3.
      Months 6-12 are where most people can use the system. I upgrade my wife's machine around month 6. She likes the snazzy new features in Digikam or whatever.
      Month 12 is when you start to realize you need stuff that's going in the next version only.
      Month 14 is when you realize that you forgot to upgrade to the next release when it was at month 6.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines; there have been zero issues.

      I have two machines and everything I use including wireless works perfectly and I do use allot of things.

      The installer was a "WTF? Oh, got it." inconvenience the first time around.

      My sentiments exactly. Personally the new installer is IMO cosmetically challenged but it does work and it works well.

    • Before is was a some guy on the Internet complaining about the installer, now it's a big name in the Linux community (and a former employee of Red Hat) saying the whole release has big problems.

      It could be that he was unlucky enough to have a bad experience but he's enough of a name that his rant is minor news.

      Personally on the two machines I've tried on one the upgrade went well but evolution ignored all my old configuration (and the configuration backup I made) and I only avoided reconfiguring it from scr

    • F18 is a bleeding-edge testing distribution.

      I wouldn't really call Fedora "bleeding edge," as in being futuristic currently. Perhaps a "bloody mess" is a better description. I find it interesting that you warn about expecting "glitches" and downplay the installer, while the Fedora teams officially promotes it as stable and reliable and makes a big deal about what a step forward their crappy installer is. I'll do the same with this as I have for the last 10+ Fedora releases - get rid of it and forget about it.

      Shame on me for banging my head against t

  • Must be really bad (Score:3)

    by Punto ( 100573 ) <puntob.gmail@com> on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:12PM (#42675639) Homepage

    If he's switching to the distro where the UI looks like they tried to copy OSX (and failed), audio is broken, and all your searches are sent to Amanzon (?), then RH must be *really* bad.

    • Yeah. I just wonder what they'll be doing with the next RHEL since last I heard it was supposed to be based on Fedora 18. From the sounds of things, they'd better either keep parts from Fedora 17 or get scrambling to fix the clusterfuck they've created in Fedora 18, test the hell out of it, and then put that in RHEL instead...

    • that they failed to copy OSX is actually a good thing

  • Duuuh. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lophophore ( 4087 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:26PM (#42675773) Homepage

    Duuuh.

    Never, ever, switch to a Fedora release until it has been out for at least 6 weeks.

    I consider Fedora to be (at best) beta-test RHEL. I've been using it for years, and I can tell you, it *always* sucks at release. Always. Give it a month or two for the worst bugs to get addressed, then install it.

    Despite its warts, I'll take Fedora 18 for $0 over Windows 8 any day.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      consider Fedora to be (at best) beta-test RHEL. I

      That's what Red Hat considers it to be as well from what I've read, except that its not a bad thing, because they were pretty upfront about it when they spun Fedora up in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      Never, ever, switch to a Fedora release until it has been out for at least 6 weeks.

      That is a bit a of a blanket statement which would not really apply to most Fedora users since developers would have been testing the Alpha and Release Candidates so the final release would be the same one you are going to get for the lifetime of the particular distribution discounting updates of course. I actually did an update on both my machines on the day and I have not had any issues. In fact I would go as far as to say that the final release of Fedora 18 is the best to date although the installer may

  • A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:27PM (#42675783) Homepage Journal

    From his G+ page:

    (and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

    • From his G+ page:

      (and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

      Ah, I get it. It's like how sleeping with just one member of the same sex doesn't 'switch you to gay'. You see, just like with sexuality there can be degrees of distro use, it doesn't have to be so black and white -- you don't have to be just a Fedora or Ubuntu user, you could be Bi-distro. Ah, but it doesn't even end there: You could even enjoy OS hybrids like that Arch/BSD chick with a dick, or you can even use Wubi to run GNU/Linux inside Windows, if you're more the man with a clam type.

      As a kernel developer, he's beyond mere experimenting; Alan Cox is a connoisseur of all flavors...
      With a name like that, would you expect any less?

  • Where is everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:28PM (#42675791)

    I understand that Fedora is an experimental platform for bleeding edge changes, but if you take the perpetual beta status too far, nobody will bother to do your testing.

  • Correction from Alan Cox (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nimey ( 114278 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:32PM (#42675827) Homepage Journal

    (and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')

    Color me shocked, shocked that a Slashdot story is sensationalized.

  • RedHat drives and influences much of what goes on out there. Among these, it influences GNOME and the audio and all the stuff people are complaining about the most. It's almost as if they are intentionally damaging themselves for some reason.

    Fedora is supposed ot be like a test for RHEL. Fedora is NOT a "bleeding edge" distro. If you want that, run "Rawhide." Fedora is supposed to be usable and is essentially a usability study for things that would end up in the next RHEL.

    Now, with all the negative fee

  • Worst Debian Distro (Score:5, Funny)

    by seyyah ( 986027 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @07:55PM (#42676039)

    So he's switched from the "Worst Red Hat Distro" to the worst Debian distro. Got it.

    • Haha, nice. He could have at least gone to Mint if he wanted Ubuntu compatibility. It's still hard to beat good ol' Debian though. (Mint Debian Edition on this machine)

  • He what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @08:10PM (#42676157) Homepage

    IS the man insane?

    Just go to Debian and all will be right with his world....

  • I completely agree... (Score:4, Informative)

    by RedHackTea ( 2779623 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @08:13PM (#42676177)
    In the past, I have been a huge Fedora fanboy. Having had been on Fedora 15 for so long, I finally made the jump to Fedora 18 yesterday! I had no problems with the installer (setting up my custom partition scheme was definitely weird; for example, you have to type "/" to get a drop down of possible mount points, and /opt and /var are seemingly excluded from this drop down for no reason).

    But oh my god, this release is a complete piece of SHIT. I'm not going to uninstall it because of how much hassle I went through (and this is my work PC), but damn, just damn. Having said this, they did fix some problems in F15, and it looks nicer, but the number of new problems outweighs the benefits. If you're thinking about upgrading, don't do it.

    Some of the problems I had to deal with:
    • Software Installer: It's now called "Software" instead of "Add/Remove Packages" or whatever. I kept typing in "Add" trying to find it. This thing is the worst piece of shit in the whole installation. They decided to completely remove the X button, remove the ability to resize/reposition, and it's auto-fullscreen on the primary monitor. If you search "libreoffice" on 2 monitors, it expands to take up 1 and 1/3 of your monitors with no way for you to resize it. When I first installed Fedora, I selected a whole bunch of packages I wanted to install and clicked apply; didn't work or do a damn thing. I had to close it and go back in and just select and install a few at a time. What baffles the mind is that this worked on F15. Whoever broke this needs to GTFO.
    • System Tray: You know that nice thing in the bottom right of your screen that you think even the dumbest fool couldn't break? They broke it. You have to sit your cursor on the bottom right for about a minute just for it to come up. Rhythmbox/tomboy/clipit/autokey system tray is useless now. And yeah, you know when something crashes and you'll get the "Automatic Bug Report" icon in the system tray? There's no way to f/cking close it.
    • Tracker: This was a problem in F15 as well. Remove this POS! It churns up tons of CPU and eats all of my memory trying to cache my whole system. Fix this or delete it. And, BTW, you can't remove this because everything depends on it. You have to do "gnome-session-properties" and make sure that it doesn't autostart. Because I didn't feel like re-logging in, I then had to kill it through System Monitor. This is garbage.
    • Non-Obvious Application Menu: Yeah, I was in Nautilus file manager for a while trying to figure out how to get to preferences. Instead of a menu now, you have to right click on the app image in the top-left corner (next to Activities and before the Time/Date). This is more of user error, but it'd be nice to let a guy know.
    • Tooltip Background Color: If you use Eclipse at all, you'll notice that your background color is black when hovering over an item and seeing the Javadoc (text is black/dark purple, so unreadable). Yeah, I thought it was Eclipse's fault...nope. I had to go to /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and change the tooltip_bg/fg_color to #f5f5b5/#000000. Let me change this in a convenient way next time...
    • Non-System Partitions: This isn't a big deal, but annoying. So I set up a few partitions just for general use during installation. I (in the wheel group) couldn't access them unless root. I had to change the umask in /etc/fstab for these.

    That's all I can think of for now. Some of these problems are GNOME 3.6's. WTFITQA (Where the f/ck is the QA?)

  • It wouldn't install. Right after where you choose to install the bootloader, it would just crash. The debug info didn't tell why at all. That happened with both the Beta and final releases. Linux Mint and lubuntu installed just fine (as did centos 6.3).

    I finally figured out what was causing it.. the optimus or whatever on my Dell laptop, where it uses the integrated Intel video for low demand stuff and an Nvidia chip for higher demand periods. I only figured this out after trying to get the nvidia binary dr

    • I'm impressed that you're putting so much effort in installing something you don't actually like.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rjr162 ( 69736 )

        Well.. issue is the systems at work are all RHEL, CentOS or FC... I haven't used FC for ages so I figured I'd give it a try. Wasn't thinking FC 18 would use gnome 3.. just a brain fart (since we use it in a server role with a different WM for xrdp).

        In the end I just went with centos since I have to setup an ipsec/l2tp vpn on a centos machine

  • ... Alan has given up his job and Linux hacking for the time being for "family reasons" according to his profile on G+

  • What just one person thinks? Think for yourself. Jeebus.

    • I don't have time to test multiple distros. I've been on Fedora since it was RedHat 4. Hearing they've messed up the installer this much makes me think I should switch.

  • Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoronix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by atomican ( 2799855 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @08:43PM (#42676455)

    Yes I know, Phoronix is a pretty scummy website at times with Michael taking credit for basically every new thing that happens to Linux, but there are some interesting posts on its forum when its users are not constantly fighting with each other.

    AdamW (Adam Williamson, "the Fedora QA Community Monkey" according to the project wiki) posted this in response to this very topic:

    It does always amaze me how people are happy to download an entire *computer operating system* and throw it at their computer - with valuable data on it! - without even reading the damn documentation.

    For Pete's sake people, it's an operating system, not a new version of Angry Birds. You might want to read something about it before hitting the big red button. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. There's a guy on the Google+ thread who says "Not knowing that The World Had Changed, I downloded the DVD of F18 and tried up upgrade my machine" - where do these people come from? And what rock have they been living under while three thousand articles explained that F18 has a new installer? Sheesh.

    So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. 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. An operating system installer is a psychotically complex lump of code, it is not plausible that you can entirely rewrite one and get it working perfectly on the first try, and we never aimed to. We aimed to have something that broadly implemented the new design and worked reasonably well in simple cases, and that's what F18 has.

    GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

    (http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?77039-Alan-Cox-Calls-Fedora-18-quot-The-Worst-Red-Hat-Distro-quot/page4)

    To which someone immediately pointed out the obvious:

    Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

    This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.

  • well... (Score:4, Funny)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @12:42AM (#42677865)
    At least he didn't switch to Windows 8. Then he'd eventually give up and just go Amish.

  • My experience is opposite... Fedora 18 is better! (Score:3)

    by urdak ( 457938 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @03:21AM (#42678367)

    I've been using Red Hat's linux distributions for 14 years, since I first switched my aging Slackware installation to Redhat 5.2. Since then, I've been upgrading or installing every new Redhat/Fedora release that came out.
    The last few upgrades, to F15, F16 and F17 were a real pain - on every release the upgrade failed in the middle, or succeeded and left me with half the system not running and I needed to spend a whole day on fixing things (a person with less experience would just give up and switch to a different distribution...).
    But the upgrade to F18 (with the new "fedup" tool) was surprisingly smooth. The upgrade just worked, and when the new system came up, everything just worked... A few annoying new bugs (like the new gphoto2 suddenly not working correctly, but that's not Fedora's fault) but nothing serious.
    So if anything, F18 was the first time in years that I did *not* consider switch to Ubuntu right after the upgrade.

  • Fedora is bleeding-edge (Score:3)

    by devent ( 1627873 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @04:26AM (#42678577) Homepage

    I really don't understand what is the fuss about. Fedora 18 was just released, what are you expecting? From Wikipedia:

    A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2.[8]

    Fedora is a bleeding-edge distribution. Much like Debian Sid. Fedora is the playground for new technology that was always so. You can't expect to have a new version of Fedora and everything be perfect.

    Just wait 6 months and upgrade then. So do I with my Fedora. I install it release+6 months and everything is fine.
    You just can't compare Fedora with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian Stable etc. The goals are totally different.
    If you want a bleeding-edge distribution with new technology then Fedora is the right distribution for you.
    If you want a stable desktop then Debian Stable is the choice for you.

  • Interesting Place To Runaway To (Score:3)

    by assertation ( 1255714 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @07:55AM (#42679281)

    Ubuntu is still *one* of the best distros. As someone who has been using it since it came out I am surprised Cox chose to runaway from Fedora to Ubuntu. Ubuntu used to be the most "least hassle" and user friendly distro. I would say with the default desktop of Unity that title now belongs to MINT linux and that is what I am putting on the new home PC I am buying in March.

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