Fedora 19 Beta Released: Alive, Dead, or Neither? 171
darthcamaro writes "Fedora 19, aka Schrödinger's Cat, is now out in Beta. There is a long list of new features in this release, including 3D modelling tools, improved security, federated VoIP, updated GNOME and KDE desktops and new improved virtual storage to name a few. '"Normally we have a good batch of features for everyone in a new release and this time around a lot of it is under the hood kinds of stuff," Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron, told ServerWatch.'"
Re:Gnome3 (Score:5, Informative)
Gnome3's interface... let's not speak of it, I prefer to not use words it deserves among civilised people.
As for Network Manager, try running it with any USB networking (direct connect, like with a phone, rather than an USB-connected ethernet card): it will kill the interface every roughly 30 seconds. Its upstream refused to fix that saying they don't aim to support every possible device.
Or, bridged setups. Or, basically anything more complex than a plain ethernet or wifi interface.
It wouldn't be bad if Network Manager accepted that it's not infallible and allowed such devices it does not support. But not, it insists it has the complete view of the system's network, everything else is wrong, and even if you blacklist a device it knows (not possible for ones it doesn't), it still says you're in "offline mode" when you use programs that made the mistake of querying NM.
If a single line, "apt-get purge network-manager", instantly fixes all problems of this kind, I'm kind of disinclined to believe that "it works pretty well".
Fedora 19 and GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
I installed Fedora 19alpha on my laptop the other day, and I have to say that Fedora's GNOME desktop has really lost me. I don't expect things to change in Fedora 19beta. In my opinion, the last usable version of GNOME was version 3.4 in Fedora 17. And that's barely usable, but things get better if you use some of the plugins.
Fedora 19 will include GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've noted elsewhere that GNOME 3 has poor usability. (My graduate thesis is on the usability of open source software.) The developers at GNOME have continued their downward usability trend, so Fedora 19 isn't getting any better. GNOME 3 fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: "Consistency" and "Menus". Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do. The Gedit text editor (which is also part of GNOME) still has menus, but the file manager does not. When you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
I've only discussed the file manager here, but I'm sad to say that this is just one example of poor usability throughout GNOME 3.8 in Fedora 19alpha. While some areas of the Fedora 19alpha desktop seem familiar, the environment contains many areas where I was left confused. Programs act differently; there's very little consistency. And the updated desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
The worst offender is the Fedora 19alpha installer itself. Maybe they fix this in Fedora 19beta, but I doubt it. Fedora used to have a very simple, easy-to-use installer. You answered a few simple questions using point-and-click or drop-down menus, then the installer did everything else for you. For example, let's say your computer was set up to "dual boot" both Fedora Linux and Microsoft Windows. Previous versions of the Fedora installer would give you the option to install over your previous Linux installation, or set up the install disk configuration yourself. The latter phrase may be more meaningful to someone with more technical knowledge, but the former is easily recognized by users of all skill levels to mean the same thing.
In the Fedora 19alpha installer, everything has changed. (Actually, I believe this changed in the Fedora 18 installer.) The installer now presents a yellow warning label that the disk doesn't have enough room. When I clicked into the disk setup tool, I was given the option to "reclaim" space, but I really didn't understand what that meant. There was no button or other option to "install over my previous Linux installation," despite the fact that this laptop only had Linux on it (an older Fedora 17 install). If I were a user with "typical" knowledge and "average" skill, I would likely be afraid to use this installer, lest it do the wrong thing.
The installer's progress bar is equally confusing. Usually, when a program displays a progress bar and a message to indicate the percent complete (such as, "Installing 50%") you might expect the progress bar to indicate the same "percent complete" as the text message. Not so during the Fedora 19alpha installation. The installer (Anaconda) displayed a message that it was installing system software, and it was "50%" complete, yet the progress bar displayed something like two-thirds complete. I quickly decided not to trust the progress bar. And it's a bad sign when your users decide not to trust your software.
Fedora 19 and Xfce (Score:4, Informative)
I know it's bad form to reply to my own comment, but I figured it was better to make a separate comment about Xfce.
I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. After I installed Fedora 19alpha GNOME, I installed Fedora 19alpha Xfce, and it is much better!
From my open source software usability test last year, the four themes of successful usability were:
While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation of Xfce is that it meets all four of these themes. The menus are there, everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the menus) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to the Aura window manager used in Google's Chromebook. It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
And of course, Xfce uses fewer system resources, so it runs very fast.
Re:Gnome3 (Score:4, Informative)
Gnome3's interface... let's not speak of it, I prefer to not use words it deserves among civilised people.
I migrated to Gnome 3 from E17 because it's actually about the best DE I've found. Yes, it has problems; there are parts of it that make me wonder WTF the developers were thinking (mostly the bits they've ripped off from Apple, which frequently seem ill thought out even on OS X), but it generally works better for me than any other DE I've tried. If you don't like Gnome 3 then that's fine - there's plenty of choice, but don't shoot down the whole distro because it happens to default to a DE that you personally don't like, but which many other people find to be excellent.
As for Network Manager, try running it with any USB networking (direct connect, like with a phone, rather than an USB-connected ethernet card): it will kill the interface every roughly 30 seconds. Its upstream refused to fix that saying they don't aim to support every possible device.
Or, bridged setups. Or, basically anything more complex than a plain ethernet or wifi interface.
The USB thing is a shame - I can't really comment on that as I've not tried using USB NICs with it.
As for "you can't do anything complex with it", IMHO it isn't intended for that use - network manager is intended as a "plug and play networking for dummies" system; if you want something complex then set NM_CONTROLLED=no in the network config and configure it yourself. Adding lots of support for very complex setups to NetworkManager itself, when that's already supported via other mechanisms, would seem to defeat its purpose of offering a *simple* network configurator.
But not, it insists it has the complete view of the system's network, everything else is wrong, and even if you blacklist a device it knows (not possible for ones it doesn't), it still says you're in "offline mode" when you use programs that made the mistake of querying NM.
That certainly doesn't seem to agree with my experiences. I frequently set systems up with NM_CONTROLLED=no in the NIC configuration and NetworkManager handles that just fine (in fact, on servers I make a point of doing this; which is fine - IMHO NetworkManager is neither intended nor suited to server environments so turning it off and using more traditional configurations (which are still supported) is a good idea).
If a single line, "apt-get purge network-manager", instantly fixes all problems of this kind, I'm kind of disinclined to believe that "it works pretty well".
If you're using apt-get then you're not using Fedora, so your comments seem a bit irrelevant to a discussion about the latest Fedora release. I can't comment on how well NetworkManager works in other distros, but under both Fedora and Scientific Linux it seems to work well and is trivial to bypass if you need lots of complexities in your network configuration.
Re:Gnome3 (Score:5, Informative)
I think its just cranky old sysadmins that don't like systemd. Its actually quite good and offers several benefits over the old sysvinit.
It's the cranky old sysadmins who keep the servers and internet running. What they say is often important. When someone tries to re-invent Windows Services, AIX smit and Windows Event log, they may grump, but they do so with the experience saying that it wasn't a good idea the last time either.
The problem is that many aren't "cranky old SA's" but just uninformed old gits that refuses to even read up on new technology and flat out denies that there any problems whatsoever with Linux logfiles, and the way Linux handles services (init etc).
Whenever I see systemd or Journal hate here on Slashdot, it is always just snarky remarks that almost always are totally wrong, and clearly demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about.
Even if you never, ever use the Journal tools or access the Journal log files, systemd and Journal will enhance the Syslog files considerably, by enabling log info early in the boot process, and tagging and aggregate the logfiles.
IMHO, systemd and Journal is the best new tools for the Linux SA made in the past decade.
I really recommend reading this list of systemd myths:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html [0pointer.de]
And Lennart's "systemd for Administrators". Here is a link to the first part of twenty instalments:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html [0pointer.de]
Very good stuff. A must read for any Linux SA, whether they think they dislike systemd or not.
Re:Gnome3 (Score:4, Informative)
And what do you do when something goes wrong? Or you need access from a different arbitrary system?
That sort of questions is exactly why you should read the linked pages. So calm your fuming hate against Poettering and start reading.
I guess your very vague question is something about accessing Journal log files, something you probably think can be problematic since they are binary, right? No worries mate. Syslog is a first class Journal client, you can read all the usual text file stuff in /var/log/* if for some reason journalctl doesn't work, but everything else does. Journal send all messages to syslog, including early boot stuff that syslog couldn't log before.
It is just that when journalctl (and all the other cool *ctl tools) works, it is faster, easier and more secure than the usual chaotic syslog logging. So what is wrong with displaying not only an error message, but also the exact link where the error message is explained and documented? "journalctl -f" instead of "cat /var/log/messages | tail" ?
Cryptographic secure logging? That you have an actual guarantee that a message is written by the daemon it claims?
"journalctl", "systemctl" and all the other *ctl tools like localectl, hostnamectl and loginctl, are just wonderful and powerful tools, that promises some kind of consistency when it comes to Linux logging and system information gathering etc.
Re:Gnome3 (Score:4, Informative)
That sounds about right.
There are also some complaints about it absorbing other components e.g. udev. to the developers this makes sense because udev is about responding to hardware events and systemd can trigger this based on these events (e.g. starting network servers when you plug in a network card, or a backup script when you plug in an external drive). also they shared a lot of code. To people who don't want to use systemd, this makes them worry about where they will get udev from, and if udev will continue to work on non systemd systems. (there is now a fork of udev called eudev)
Re:Not dead, Jim. But... (Score:5, Informative)
systemd is extremely well documented:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/ [freedesktop.org]
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TipsAndTricks/ [freedesktop.org]
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/FrequentlyAskedQuestions [freedesktop.org]
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging [freedesktop.org]
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Incompatibilities [freedesktop.org]
what the heck could you possibly be missing?
Re:Gnome3 (Score:4, Informative)
More powerful than sysv, at least. For instance:
Don't you want to know whether the processes associated with a service are running, exited successfully, exited unsuccessfully, etc? sysv is bad at that ('service foo status' is very basic and dependent on the initscript in question). systemd is much better.
Don't you want to be able to start services or not conditionally? This is fantastically useful; we're using it all over the place in Fedora. We only start the iscsi service if there are actually iscsi nodes available, for instance. You can make service startup conditional on the presence or absence of a file, directory or command line parameter, or whether the system is running under virtualization or not, or various other conditions.
Don't you want to be able to say 'let me see all the logs associated with this service'? systemd and journald together allow you to do that.
Don't you want to be able to have services activate on demand rather than just all running at startup? systemd does that. services can be set to activate when they're accessed, via a port or a socket.
and on, and on, and on. Really, just read up on the various blog posts, systemd website pages etc which explain the oodles of features systemd brings to the table. They are really useful.