Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu 380
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."
Go Arch (Score:4, Informative)
After making the switch from Ubuntu to Fedora after the Unity fiasco, I recently switched from F17 to Arch due to all the delays. I couldn't be happier.
A small addendum (Slashdot slapdown) (Score:5, Informative)
From his G+ page:
Correction from Alan Cox (Score:5, Informative)
(and Slashdot, moving one PC from Fedora with Ubuntu VM to just Ubuntu isn't 'switching to Ubuntu')
Color me shocked, shocked that a Slashdot story is sensationalized.
Re: forgot RH7 (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html [redhat.com]
He's right about ugly incompatibilities. Old code which complied fine and compiled on other platforms didn't work on RH7. That the underlying reason was non-standards compliant programming and a much stricter compiler didn't change the problem. It also didn't help that the compiler was enforcing c++ standards against c code.
Re:Come on, Alan ;( (Score:5, Informative)
I completely agree... (Score:4, Informative)
But oh my god, this release is a complete piece of SHIT. I'm not going to uninstall it because of how much hassle I went through (and this is my work PC), but damn, just damn. Having said this, they did fix some problems in F15, and it looks nicer, but the number of new problems outweighs the benefits. If you're thinking about upgrading, don't do it.
Some of the problems I had to deal with:
That's all I can think of for now. Some of these problems are GNOME 3.6's. WTFITQA (Where the f/ck is the QA?)
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Informative)
I concur that. I switched to Debian after the fiasco of RH7 and never looked back.
You do know that RH 7 came out in 2000 and was discontinued after RH 9 in 2003 for Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 2. The latest release of RHEL is version 6 which will be supported for 13 years. Go to the Redhat site, they don't hide anything if you don't believe me.
Personally I don't really like the Debian distributions and prefer the Fedora/Redhat ones since I have never had many problems with Fedora Core 7 and have updated regularly all the way to Fedora 18 which IMHO is actually the best distribution to date although I would say that the new installer is a little bit cosmetically challenged, however it does what it is supposed to do and it does it well. I do think Alan Cox's statement saying that the new installer is unusable is totally wrong, although I do agree it is different.
For me to go from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 I always do a fresh install of the OS which in this case took me about 45 minutes, then it took me an additional 30 minutes to install all software i use and potentially use. Then it took me about an hour to do the updates on over 1700 packages and during that time I actually did other things such as watching a video and surfing the web on the machine I was updating.
Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:4, Informative)
"As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer."
No they are not. You may be having problems with them, in which case sorry, but it is not correct to say they are completely broken, as they are not.
We tested kickstart installs extensively during F18 validation and they work fine. Just fine. In fact they're the part of install that has changed least since F17. It is impossible to help you with whatever problem you're seeing without any details at all, but it is definitely not the case that kickstarts are 'completely broken'.
On "password-protect GRUB" - see the other guy's response. It is not 'completely broken'. The default behaviour of password protection changed upstream between grub1 and grub2; we are following upstream behaviour. 'Restoring' the grub1 behaviour is, as the other guy said, not as straightforward as it might seem.
"lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation"
This seems like an odd thing to talk about. Are you saying you want to do that but you can't? Or what? Details.
"expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install"
Works fine in testing.
"require that updated packages be installed during automated installation"
Kickstart install uses the repos you define. Define repos that include updates and updates will be installed. Don't, and they won't. It's entirely up to you. This has not changed at all between F17 and F18.
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:2, Informative)
The installer is a big trap for newbies if you want to use applications on that OS that insist on using the "C:" drive. Some commercial software is very slow to develop and is not compatible with MS Windows 7 unless you take care in the installation to change from the default and install it all in one partition.
Re:HP provides Debian support? (Score:4, Informative)