Fedora 13 Is Out

ultranerdz writes "Fedora 13 has just been released. It includes major features such as automatic print driver installation, automatic language pack installation, redesigned user account tool, color management to calibrate monitors and scanners, experimental 3-D support for NVIDIA video cards, and more."

Re:is it faster?

[Luke has no name]

But yum has a better output layout than apt-get, IMO. I wish the apt guys would look at YUM for inspiration.

Sweet

[sv_libertarian]

Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data, and making a new live CD (I always have the worst luck with direct download/upgrade for some reason). I still can't decide *WHY* I use Fedora over say Gentoo or Ubuntu (Ok, Gentoo is just too damned annoying to build and install). I do get tired of enabling mp3/flash/etc... in Fedora though.

Skipped 12

[0racle]

I had to skip Fedora 12 because X and/or KDE couldn't handle both of my nvidia cards. Enabling one with both monitors worked fine, but having X configure both cards (binary nvidia of course) locked the machine completely.

With support for Fedora 11 ending soon, I'm hoping this has been resolved.

Re:Sweet

[Vectormatic]

I have a perfectly good reason for using fedora over ubuntu. Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

and yeah, what the AC said, USB boot FTW, you just need a 1gb usb stick, which are pretty much free with a box of cereal these days

Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice

[Scareduck]

... it still has some gaping flaws.

• gthumb absorbs all memory in sight when downloading images from a camera. This alone makes it useless for anyone into photography. I see gthumb has been replaced by Shotwell, so hopefully this amounts to an improvement.
• Printer configuration is insanely complex and obscure. Really, this is a gripe about CUPS, but I just don't like either that much.
• NetworkManager is an abortion that doesn't play well with the usual Unixy config files, but is strangely necessary for the desktop to operate correctly. I think this finally got fixed in more recent versions (Fedora 12).
• Audio is just plain broken. Major features -- such as the ability to mix external audio -- have been missing since Fedora 11. Nobody seems to care, or know how the new audio system, Pulse Audio, works.

Thanks Fedora guys

[pizzach]

I appreciate you guys putting gWaei into the repositories. I was forced to install Fedora 13 rawhide to do some testing with gtk+-2.20 (I think) and I was impressed with the package manager. Much cleaner than synaptic. Though I didn't like the lack of progress bars for so many things.

If I want an easy to set up distribution, I would probably prefer Fedora over Ubuntu nowadays. I give the Fedora guys props. (When I say easy to setup, I don't necessarily mean newbie friendly.)

Re:Sweet

[sammyF70]

You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

Re:is it faster?

[suso]

You are joking I hope.

Having used both rpm and apt for a long time now in a sysadmin setting, I can say that both have their pluses and minuses. rpm to me has a much more professional feel to it IMHO. I really wish that dpkg had the -V flag like rpm does, I've used that more times than you probably could imagine. rpm always seems faster at finding a package name given a file path and at listing out the files in a package. On the flip side, rpm historically hasn't had good depenencies and I never liked how they always wanted to compile in support for everything in rpm, which is one reason I liked being able to configure all that in emerge on Gentoo. Plus rpm used to have all kinds of problems with the database getting locked or corrupt. I switched to Gentoo as a workstation a while back when I tried to uninstall kernel-source and it said I couldn't because some audio library depended on it. That just shouldn't ever happen. But then I switched to Ubuntu because Gentoo development goes so fast that if you don't emerge -pv system practically every night, you end up not being able to upgrade at all.

So the point is that there are always reasons for the various package management systems being the way they are and because most people are unique, there are always going to be people who like those different features. You shouldn't poke fun of their choices until you understand them better. Hence the phrase, don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.

Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows.

[evilviper]

Your comment isn't talking about Windows and Linux at all. You are almost entirely talking about Explorer and GNOME/KDE. There are a few underlying system services, like CUPS, grub, kudzu, etc., but you're mostly talking about UI.

If that's all you care about, good for you. The rest of us want much more from an operating system than a vaguely familiar interface. The more extensively you actually use it, the more apparent the differences become.

Re:is it faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. The apt-get tool is powerful, but the interface and output is terrible. With YUM all package management is pretty straight forward and easy to explain to a new comer. Want to install software?

yum install packagename

Remove software?

yum remove packagename

Want to find a package?

yum search keyword

With the apt-get family of tools, most of the commands are short and.or cryptic. It may get the job done and apt-get may be a little faster, but it's so ugly and cryptic that it's not work the extra performance. The differences between the man pages are pretty eye-opening too. The apt-get manual is obvious written by programmers and sysadmin types for the same, where the yum page is written for human beings.

Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Pulseaudio has be perfect on Ubuntu Lucid. I'm as amazed any anyone. It was a total disaster for the longest time and then all of a sudden no more issues.

Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't get all the animosity towards PulseAudio. Since they put it in Ubuntu, it's worked fine for me on all hardware I've used it on (4 laptops, 3 desktops and VirtualBox and VMWare - all different combinations of Creative, RealTek and other soundcards).

Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice

[V!NCENT]

Yeah keep hearing that... I never had a problem with PulseAudio since day with Fedora.

But then again I did my homework before buying my computer. You see, it turns out PulseAudio has a fallback mechanism for when there is no PulseAudio driver for your sound card and then reverses the routing to Alsa and OSS drivers.

Cool and all... but given the fact that most Alsa drivers are dirty hacks, problems survice, like stuttering audio and not hearing audio at all sometimes.

The exeption to this rule is Skype, which is a horribly dirty hack on Linux and there is a reason that some parts of it are now open sourced so that some people would fix their shit for them, which they didn't because Skype is proprietary and just plain ugly.

Just my $0,02. But remember to do your homework next time before you badmouth something :)

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

3) When idle, Fedora actually is idle. load average: 0.01, 0.05, 0.02. On Ubuntu 10.04 my load would be >0.4. Check it out.

Re:Sweet

[sv_libertarian]

You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

Mmmmm I'll check it out. I've used Gentoo, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Fedora. I loved Gentoo, but hated the install process, and wound up just going back to Fedora, and have stayed in a Red Hat induced rut.

Re:Let me save you some trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. I can fix a package for my OSS OS.

However, if I don't get the original maintainers to accept my patch and include it into the official distribution I'm as good as dead.

Do you realize the work needed to re-patch your system continuously?

And WONTFIX means they will not look at my patch favorably.

Hell I have some patches that have been given green light but are still in a limbo until they are committed and it has been like 6 months.

And that is for an OS I care about and care about individual developers not having the time to do something. If RH did that to me I would move on to Ubuntu.

Re:Prien715 is Weird

[laddiebuck]

GP is an idiot but so are you. I happen not to give a shit about the tech industry -- about all I follow is a couple of Slashdot stories every week. I just need to get things done as efficiently as possible. There's no faster way for just about any general-purpose task involving a computer than the Unix shell. When you get to specialised tasks, it's often the case that a program that deals with text interfaces is still going to be the fastest, because you can mangle text or edit it much better with grep/awk/sed/cut and vim/emacs or in a pinch perl/python than with anything else. And if your OS is built around text, which you get with the Unix CLI, then you're gold.

All I'm trying to say is that the computer to me is not a "reason-to-live" as you put it, just another tool like my car. But it so happens that the fastest way to get things done and get things done that would be impossible with other interfaces, and do all this with the minimum rise in blood pressure, is the Unix CLI. And that's why I run Debian Linux -- it doesn't get in my way, just gives me more power than the non-Unixlike OSes. (OS X really gets in my way and I hate it even though it has acceptable underlying tools.)