Fedora 18 Installer: Counterintuitive and Confusing?

An anonymous reader writes "Igor Ljubuncic, former physicist and current IT Systems Programmer and blogger, reviews Fedora 18 with its new installer. In his role as alter ego Dedoimedo, the self proclaimed 'king of everything', Igor's Linux distro and DE reviews are often wry and biting and this review is no exception: 'You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe. In all my life testing Linux and other operating systems, I have never ever seen an installer that is so counter-intuitive, dangerous and useless, all at the same time.'" The non-linear installer interface does look like kind of confusing, at least from the screenshots posted.

non-linear installers are good, at least in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoth the Fedora wiki [fedoraproject.org],

With the change to a hub-and-spoke model rather than a linear wizard model, the new UI allows users to entirely skip screens that they aren't interested in interacting with, streamlining the install process to only those screens that are most essential for installation to proceed.

So, it's like the Debian installer, only less powerful and more confusing!

/me runs away

Re:Mint a good alternative for traditionalists

[Anonymous Coward]

But my keyboard only goes up to F12... What gives?

Re:I must agree

[pepsikid]

I don't see what was wrong with the old installer. It was straightforward and covered all the bases. This new one was like a frustrating chose-your-own adventure, and left me fearing that I'd skipped over part of the process. I felt like it was fighting me when I wanted to erase various vista, ubuntu 10.10 and dell diag partitions and just give it the whole drive. I asked myself "they delayed the launch 3 months for THIS?". However, I'll probably stick with F18 for now since I'm reading that F19 will not have fallback gui. I use the fallback exclusively since I don't have to install any further guis and gnome 3's vino vnc server sucks rancid goat balls when I'm trying to remote into the desktop.

Re:I must agree

[caseih]

Mate runs on F18 and presumably F19 as well. And the fork of Gnome fall-back is likely to have packages for Fedora as well. So the desktop itself shouldn't really play much into your decision whether or not to stay with Fedora, and some version of Fedora. Lots of other things definitely play into this unfolding story.

Seems like devs are chasing mythical "normal/beginner" computer users and in the process leaving those of us who are a bit savy and use Linux in the lurch. In the end, they will have no users at all. Everyone I know is pretty happy with Windows 7, or more likely, Apple.I honestly can't offer them much with Linux anymore, unless they are a programmer and want the sweet development tools Linux can host (Qt and cross-compiling!). But I digress.

Re:No contribution = whining about a gift

[hawkinspeter]

Did you make sure that your computer had power? Was it turned on?