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Linux Business Red Hat Software

Fedora 21 Linux Will Be Nameless 128

Posted by samzenpus from the john-doe dept.
darthcamaro writes "What follows in the footsteps of Heisenbug, Spherical Cow and Beefy Miracle? Apparently the answer is 'null' as is nothing. Fedora Linux 21 could well have no funky new name as its past predecessors have all had, thanks to a recent vote by the Fedora board to move away from the existing naming practices. Fedora 21 itself will not be out in the first half of 2014 either, instead the plan is now for a release sometime around August. A delayed release however doesn't mean something is wrong as Red Hat's community Linux distro aims to re-invent itself."
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Fedora 21 Linux Will Be Nameless More

Fedora 21 Linux Will Be Nameless

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  • Good! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by inflamed ( 1156277 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:08PM (#45945337) Homepage
    The use of both naming and version numbers to differentiate distribution versions makes searching for bug workarounds harder.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Now I don't have to see ASCII garbage in my bootloader because they use Unicode for Schrodinger's umlaut.

      • Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)

        by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:13PM (#45945905) Homepage Journal

        Is Schroedinger's Umlaut there or not there until you look at /etc/issue?

        • I see a jumble of improperly decoded UTF-8 in grub2 despite defining that as my charset

          • I see a jumble of improperly decoded UTF-8 in grub2 despite defining that as my charset

            Yep, and I bet this was the real impetus for scratching the names - one had become embarrassing. That's not to say that there might not be good reasons for it, but really nobody ever uses the names when filing bug reports, discussing on lists, etc., and that grub2 blunder stares you in the face on every reboot.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by allo ( 1728082 )

              It was part of their goal. To fix all the issues, which chars like ö (and the ' in the name) are causing. Most languages are more complex than ascii. The german language with its 4 Umlauts is easy, think of chinese ... The important base programs and libraries need to be utf-8 safe.

              • The important base programs and libraries need to be utf-8 safe.

                So true! I remember the pain when we went through with this in the perl community, but - really now - that was 1999. Once it's done, it's done.

                Fifteen years later, it's "past-due" in the free OS base.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by allo ( 1728082 )

                  Okay, ' is really evil, they could have used ’ (UTF-8 Apostrophe, some fonts can even display it nicer than the tick mark). But on the other hand, ' is even ASCII ... And then try to add some whitespace to filenames in /etc ;).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Then you should use names. Google is terrible at finding something by version number. For some reason it often seems to think any number is a sufficient hit.

      • Then you should use names. Google is terrible at finding something by version number. For some reason it often seems to think any number is a sufficient hit.

        Agreed. This is a problem with firefox version searches too. I preferred version numbers back 6 years ago when google didn't ignore your search queries and quotes.

        Up until recently, if you looked for something like firefox 28 and get something like 3.5.28. What on earth? It seems to be better, as I can't replicate. Yahoo is still affected [yahoo.com]

        • So search for "Firefox 28" instead.

          The problem with using names is that you then have to map them back to numbers to use. If this feature is included in Firefox ugly cat, and later, does it work in firefox 24?

  • ...but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum, uniformly radiating milk in all directions.

  • Let's see who doesn't filter this character, so it may break some systems.

  • Obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by tempest69 ( 572798 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:10PM (#45945359) Journal
    Fedora 21 (Black Jack)
    I'm calling it that, and I dont care if Fedora leaves it nameless.

  • Naming releases (Score:4, Insightful)

    by similar_name ( 1164087 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:10PM (#45945361)
    I used to not care for naming releases. Just give me version numbers. However, I've changed my mind. Now I find it more fruitful to search for issues with a particular version by name rather than by number.

    • Re:Naming releases (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:23PM (#45945473)

      However, I've changed my mind. Now I find it more fruitful to search for issues with a particular version by name rather than by number

      Yes, but what do you do if you need to figure out the software requirements?
      Quick, does "at least mountain lion" include "leopard"? How about "at least Cheetah version, but no later than Crouching Striped Tiger"?

      • However, I've changed my mind. Now I find it more fruitful to search for issues with a particular version by name rather than by number

        Yes, but what do you do if you need to figure out the software requirements?
        Quick, does "at least mountain lion" include "leopard"? How about "at least Cheetah version, but no later than Crouching Striped Tiger"?

        Crouching Striped Tiger? What about the Hidden Polka Dot Dragon?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by armanox ( 826486 )

        Which is why having both are useful.

      • I didn't mean to imply that I wanted names to the exclusion of numbers. I still like version numbers. Although names like Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream and Jelly Bean aren't hard to figure out. Silly names aside, some of the others follow a similar convention.

    • Number searches have gotten crappy, like I said in my other comment.
      Name searches are meant to be newbie-friendly. Random non-geek trying out Ubuntu X doesn't know how to pull up the version number, but can memorize the funny name and find forum support on google

      For those of us who are affixed to Linux year after year the names can become a pain if we've skipped a few versions. And seeing how much hoarding we do with machines we've re-purposed, keeping track of it all is a pain.

      It's still horrible for Andro

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gfxguy ( 98788 )
        Then people should use BOTH when they are referring to a version, like software 8.3, sugar coated jelly kumquat, because I'm an old man - I can't remember if sugar coated jelly kumquat came before or after waffles with maple syrup, and when someone tells me they have ice cream sandwich I have NO idea what version of android they are talking about (although at least I know it's android)... all I know is I have android 4.1 on my phone. And it makes no sense to me to say "you need at least version donuts with

  • Longer cycles and tick/tock please (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:30PM (#45945525)

    I gave up on Fedora after 14. It is too much of a bleeding edge perpetual beta and moving target. Please make it a one year new feature release with a 6 month stabilization release. I realize RHEL is the production distribution, and the derivative CentOS 6.x is my favorite distribution by far. A testing distribution like Fedora won't get as wide of testing if it is as unstable as it was when I gave up.

    • Fedora 20 is excellent out of the (metaphorical) box. I'm going to move my dad across to it from Mint next time I do an update. (It has become difficult to build a git version of wine since Ubuntu made some upstream changes to multilib)
      • You should instead wait and move to CentOS 7 (or Sci Linux 7), which will be based on FC 19 or 20 and will be stable for 4-5 years.

        Putting anyone on Fedora who isn't willing to rebuild their box every 1-2 years is a fool's errand.
    • Half the time I try Fedora, yum introduces something that keeps it from booting. No other distro breaks in such a spectacular way for me.

      Hopefully, this new development model with introduce just a bit more stability. With Red Hat behind it, Fedora should be a premier distribution I can recommend to others. In the meantime, I'll stick with recommending Ubuntu, Mint, and openSUSE to those who don't mind doing some repo configuration for non-free stuff.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I gave up on Fedora after 14. It is too much of a bleeding edge perpetual beta and moving target. Please make it a one year new feature release with a 6 month stabilization release. I realize RHEL is the production distribution, and the derivative CentOS 6.x is my favorite distribution by far. A testing distribution like Fedora won't get as wide of testing if it is as unstable as it was when I gave up.

      Tell me something when you've used a Fedora release within the last three years. Until then, you're just complaining about ancient history.

      Six releases of Windows ago, things were pretty hard

      Six releases of Macintosh ago, things were pretty hard

      Don't even attempt to tell me that things are pretty hard right now with Fedora, you have self-admitted that you don't know it. I've been using Fedora from RedHat 6.2 through Fedora 1 till today. It's not that hard, and apart from two pretty spectacular messes tha

      • Hell yeah, 6.2 baybay! That was when I jumped over from slackware.

        Still happy. Of course, I'm also still on F16.

        yum had problems at first. It was not an instant success. But it has been years since I've had problems that weren't directly related to 3rd party rpm repos. And it manages my mixed 32/64bit build environments perfectly.

    • I'm still on 16, and I've been using it since it was "RedHat Linux." I'm not convinced it is some sort of "testing" distro. It is actually mostly a developers distro, that also works really well on servers. It has to have newer stuff because developers need a tool chain that can run the latest versions. It also can't be too bleeding edge, because the servers need stable versions. A lot of the stuff on fedora is many versions in the past, for these reasons. Other stuff is nearly in the future. The big change

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      It is too much of a bleeding edge perpetual beta and moving target

      That is kind of the point.

    • That's why there is Fedora. When I used to be a sysadmin, I run CentOS on all Linux servers and desktops at work while using Fedora on a personal desktop at home. Fedora is a too fast of a moving target for production environments, but it's nice OS for enthusiasts looking for an OS that gets an annual update that includes all the bleeding edge software.

      • I wish I could run CentOS for everything. Unfortunately, for the Desktop CentOS has problem keeping up with the changes in VPN technology, so because in my practice I'm liable to run into anything, I run Fedora 17 on the desktop and Fedora 19 in my laptop. I will be trying either Fedora 20 or 21 in a "beta" computer before making the transition. The news that 21 is going to mark the beginning of longer update cycles, but not as long as Enterprise update cycles, is welcome. Of course, that means my expen

  • Now if Debian... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    would only do this! Their secret name version mapping is ridiculous. There's nothing on the main page that maps the names to the versions, and people that ask for help with it on the mailing lists are treated horrifically.

  • When searching for information relavent to a release, say Debian 7, putting 'debian 7' into Google is useless, since Google can't infer the meaning of a number 7 in a document.  Searching for 'debian wheezy', however, is far more specific, since 'wheezy' isn't used where the number 7 might be (for example 'bug with proglet 7 on debian 3' might match pages talking about bugs with proglet running on debian 7 where the error code is 3).  If they don't have a codename, at least attach a unique memorable short string to each release so that it can be easily searched for.

  • Enough with the stupid names! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RuffMasterD ( 3398975 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:56PM (#45945751)
    Thank you Fedora, for dropping the stupid names already. Code name my distro Humping Hippo for all I care, but don't put it into the final product. I shouldn't have to search the Internet every time I need to translate between release number and codename. Sure, I can run 'lsb_release -r' or whatever command on my own system, but what about every other system out there? Ubuntu, your move...

  • Nothing to see here. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:10PM (#45945873)
    They "reinvent" themselves every few years... basically whenever they start attracting too many users.
  • One of the things in the Linux Standard Base is codename. What will "lsb_release" -c return?

  • no name? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:32PM (#45946063)

    so i guess we have to call it The Release Formerly Known As Fedora 21.

  • Simple enough (Score:3)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:41PM (#45946125)

    It will simply be the distro with no name [imdb.com]

  • Is it really going to be just Fedora 21?

    I sort of like the name Null Nadda!

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <hoytduff @ g m a i l .com> on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @12:17AM (#45947669) Homepage Journal

    RedHat admits that it cannot come up with dumber names than Canonical.

  • Another Paradigm Shift? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    After the demonstrable trade-off of "oooh, shiny!" features versus anything resembling traceability, supportability, or compatiblity demonstrated by:

    1) NetworkManager
    2) SeLinux
    3) udev
    4) Gnome3

  • When you have a dozen releases of OS within a decade, no one is going to remember the individual names anyways.

  • I still have a bootloader menu entry for Fedora 19 called "Schr?dinger?s cat" since nobody bothered to check if it could cope with umlauts or apostrophes. I wonder if Fedora 21 will feature a blank menu entry.

  • I don't know about you, but I really don't like the redesigned Fedora installer (Anaconda) that's turned up in recent Fedora releases. It's quite SHOUTY (yes, headings in full capitals and bold too!) and the disk partitioning section is frankly awful (very non-obvious, mixed units and it took me ages to work out how to create a partition that used all the remaining space - answer: put a huge value for the size and it'll round it down to what's left).

    Fedora with the MATE desktop isn't too bad, but sadly that

    • Having had to write my own SysV init scripts... I can't say that I'll be sorry to see them go. There's a lot of corner cases that they don't handle well (dependencies on another service are hard) and you constantly have to roll-your-own solution to common problems.

      It's the difference between building a modern website using Java servlets (JSP) files vs a modern framework like Spring.

      Yes, you can do very quick creations and tweaks of existing SysV init files, but as soon as you need to do anything more c

  • Call it fedora core 21!

    • I've noticed in the package tree, while everyone refers to it as "Fedora 20," the abbreviation on all the packages is packagename.fc20.arch.rpm, so they're still versioning as Fedora Core.

      Sam

  • They obviously did name it: cat /dev/null

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