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

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."

Go Arch

[sphantom]

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.

A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown)

[Chas]

From his G+ page:

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

Correction from Alan Cox

[Nimey]

(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.

Re: forgot RH7

[fluffy99]

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

He's right about ugly incompatibilities. Old code which complied fine and compiled on other platforms didn't work on RH7. That the underlying reason was non-standards compliant programming and a much stricter compiler didn't change the problem. It also didn't help that the compiler was enforcing c++ standards against c code.

Re:Come on, Alan ;(

[dririan]

They switched back to GNOME. [phoronix.com]

I completely agree...

[RedHackTea]

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?)

Re:forgot RH7

[donaldm]

I concur that. I switched to Debian after the fiasco of RH7 and never looked back.

You do know that RH 7 came out in 2000 and was discontinued after RH 9 in 2003 for Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2. The latest release of RHEL is version 6 which will be supported for 13 years. Go to the Redhat site, they don't hide anything if you don't believe me.

Personally I don't really like the Debian distributions and prefer the Fedora/Redhat ones since I have never had many problems with Fedora Core 7 and have updated regularly all the way to Fedora 18 which IMHO is actually the best distribution to date although I would say that the new installer is a little bit cosmetically challenged, however it does what it is supposed to do and it does it well. I do think Alan Cox's statement saying that the new installer is unusable is totally wrong, although I do agree it is different.

For me to go from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 I always do a fresh install of the OS which in this case took me about 45 minutes, then it took me an additional 30 minutes to install all software i use and potentially use. Then it took me about an hour to do the updates on over 1700 packages and during that time I actually did other things such as watching a video and surfing the web on the machine I was updating.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[AdamWill]

"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.

Re:forgot RH7

[dbIII]

the installer works just fine

The installer is a big trap for newbies if you want to use applications on that OS that insist on using the "C:" drive. Some commercial software is very slow to develop and is not compatible with MS Windows 7 unless you take care in the installation to change from the default and install it all in one partition.

Re:HP provides Debian support?

[JonJ]

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/debian/index.html [hp.com] I'm sure they also support it since they've got drivers and software for the distro. I didn't bother looking for prices and stuff, but I'm certain you can put on your big boy pants and figure it out yourself. If you _really_ wanted to know.