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."
People use Red Hat? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ubuntu, really? (Score:1, Insightful)
Wtf, Linux veterans are now using Ubuntu? Go get Arch.
Recent Linux updates... (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like whenever I wipe and re-upgrade a distro I end up having to take weeks to make it work the way I want it to. Although, I have to say I like it better than Windows 8...
Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this news? Slashdot already covered F18's wacky installer.
F18 is a bleeding-edge testing distribution. People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch. New things get tried in Fedora. Some of them are great; some of them are dubious. It's always been this way. This is surely not news.
We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines; there have been zero issues. The installer was a "WTF? Oh, got it." inconvenience the first time around.
Thanks for the kernels, AC, and you can say what you like, but people whose OS installs get screwed up tend to be louder than those for whom things just work. I wonder if he even bothered to report a bug. Probably not.
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:People use Red Hat? (Score:2, Insightful)
The first distro I ever bought was a Red Hat 4.something in a retail box. Tried several others, including Mandrake when it appeared ('cause at the time Red Hat didn't have KDE and I wanted to try it.) Settled on Debian for a number of years, then switched to Ubuntu. Using Ubuntu now, but considering a future switch to Mint.
Re:Ubuntu, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
These people have lives.
Duuuh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Duuuh.
Never, ever, switch to a Fedora release until it has been out for at least 6 weeks.
I consider Fedora to be (at best) beta-test RHEL. I've been using it for years, and I can tell you, it *always* sucks at release. Always. Give it a month or two for the worst bugs to get addressed, then install it.
Despite its warts, I'll take Fedora 18 for $0 over Windows 8 any day.
Re:Go Arch (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll admit that systemd has a learning curve as some commands don't have equivalents, but after a couple of days of having to google for the right commands, I don't think its as bad as its made out to be (most likely by those who aren't willing to atleast try to use it for an extended period of time).
IMHO, it seems to be a "simple but limited" vs "complex and powerful" argument. I also find switching distros solely because of the init system to be a little much. Do yourself a favor and at least attempt to learn the regularly used systemd commands with an open mind. You may find its not nearly as bad as you think.
Where is everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that Fedora is an experimental platform for bleeding edge changes, but if you take the perpetual beta status too far, nobody will bother to do your testing.
He what? (Score:4, Insightful)
IS the man insane?
Just go to Debian and all will be right with his world....
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ubuntu, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alan Cox doesn't have to pretend to be 1337 so there's no point in him using Arch.
Re:Go Arch (Score:1, Insightful)
That sounds so appealing, isn't it a wonder that all the non-geeks in the world aren't interested in switching to Linux? I mean how could they not want to go through a process of installing, testing, uninstalling and re-installing to find an operating system that works when they want to use their computer?
Linux is great for geeks but with the disjoint effort and lack of consistency it's entirely unsurprising that desktop marketshare for Linux is virtually nothing.
Re:People use Red Hat? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you like Ubuntu okay and are frustrated with other distros, you will probably love Mint. I've moved on to Mint's Debian Edition, which still has some unfortunate flaws, but I keep hoping they'll change their focus to the Debian base and just forget Ubuntu. I keep testing new releases when they become available, thinking maybe I'm missing something. Invariably I wipe the test partitions and sleep well knowing Mint works for me, looks how I like, does everything I ask of it, and is reliable. Of course I call this sort of testing "fun," but it reaffirms my OS choice. And BTW, I had high hopes for Fedora 18, but it is a joke.
Re:This will be followed by a new headline tomorro (Score:4, Insightful)
Alan Cox: Ubuntu "Most useless and senseless desktop ever," Switches to Gentoo
You obviously don't know him. He will install xfce as soon as he figures out how apt-get works, which will take him about 2 nanoseconds.
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:forgot RH7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you've got it running it's a mixed bag. The built-in Wine is flat-out awesome (it even has near-perfect compatibility with DirectX) but the preinstalled software is extremely sparse for such a big distro (you don't even get GCC!), for some reason the login screen doesn't allow you to select the window manager, leaving you stuck with the default one... Oh yeah, and you can't even get out of X11 while the system is running. No shell, no nothing. Who does that?
I'd recommend it for compatibility purposes only. If you need Wine for something this is the distro to use. For everything else just use another distro.