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."

People use Red Hat?

[Blindman]

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.

Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf, Linux veterans are now using Ubuntu? Go get Arch.

Recent Linux updates...

[Darkness404]

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...

Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[neiras]

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.

Re:forgot RH7

[ruir]

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

Re:People use Red Hat?

[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:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

These people have lives.

Duuuh.

[lophophore]

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:Go Arch

[sphantom]

I'll admit that systemd has a learning curve as some commands don't have equivalents, but after a couple of days of having to google for the right commands, I don't think its as bad as its made out to be (most likely by those who aren't willing to atleast try to use it for an extended period of time).

IMHO, it seems to be a "simple but limited" vs "complex and powerful" argument. I also find switching distros solely because of the init system to be a little much. Do yourself a favor and at least attempt to learn the regularly used systemd commands with an open mind. You may find its not nearly as bad as you think.

Where is everyone?

[Sponge Bath]

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.

He what?

[Lumpy]

IS the man insane?

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

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

Clearly you weren't around for Redhat 5.0, with the libc5->glibc fuckup.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Cox doesn't have to pretend to be 1337 so there's no point in him using Arch.

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds so appealing, isn't it a wonder that all the non-geeks in the world aren't interested in switching to Linux? I mean how could they not want to go through a process of installing, testing, uninstalling and re-installing to find an operating system that works when they want to use their computer?

Linux is great for geeks but with the disjoint effort and lack of consistency it's entirely unsurprising that desktop marketshare for Linux is virtually nothing.

Re:People use Red Hat?

[uvajed_ekil]

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.

Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro

[Tough Love]

Alan Cox: Ubuntu "Most useless and senseless desktop ever," Switches to Gentoo

You obviously don't know him. He will install xfce as soon as he figures out how apt-get works, which will take him about 2 nanoseconds.

Re:forgot RH7

[smash]

You are forgetting systemd and pulseaudio, which also introduces compatibility issues for everyone else as well, when desktop environments start requiring it.

Re:forgot RH7

[hawkinspeter]

I tried that one as well. The package management seems totally broken and there's no SSH. WTF?

Re:forgot RH7

[Jesus_666]

I take it you have never tried to use the Windows 7 installer on a system with more then one SATA drive, then. Let's just say that between bizarre, undocumented requirements (the installer expects to be installed on the first SATA drive; you can select another drive but you'll get an error message after configuring the partitions) and the cryptic error messages given if you don't meet them (something about not finding a system partition) it's clearly not ready for prime time but was shipped regardless. I haven't looked at the Metro one yet but I hope they switched to something more reasonable like Ubiquity. Home-grown installers clearly aren't Redmond's forte.

Once you've got it running it's a mixed bag. The built-in Wine is flat-out awesome (it even has near-perfect compatibility with DirectX) but the preinstalled software is extremely sparse for such a big distro (you don't even get GCC!), for some reason the login screen doesn't allow you to select the window manager, leaving you stuck with the default one... Oh yeah, and you can't even get out of X11 while the system is running. No shell, no nothing. Who does that?

I'd recommend it for compatibility purposes only. If you need Wine for something this is the distro to use. For everything else just use another distro.