Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu

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."

forgot RH7

[dltaylor]

THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

Ugly, ugly incompatibilities abounded. Even "build from source" didn't work very well, since the compiler was not really "C", or any other language.

Re: forgot RH7

[xose]

Maybe you are wrong: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html [redhat.com]

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit like ... support? That's fine if you are a home hobby user, but not in a corporate env. We need someone to blame.
Redhat provides that.
Ubuntu provides that.

Arch, mint, debian do not - except from 3rd parties. I'm not claiming that 3rd party support is not really better, just that explaining that to management is a loosing effort.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> We're using F18 here on all our desktop machines

Do you use kickstarts to automate deployment?
On top of that, do you
* password-protect GRUB?
* lock out users from accessing a shell on /dev/tty2 during installation?
* expect GDM to show up (or, heck, Xorg to run) after doing an automated install?
* require that updated packages be installed during automated installation?

As of today, all these things are completely broken in F18 and the new installer. If you know workarounds, please reply! We could use your help and I'd send you a nice gift in return. :-)
—DMW

Re:Go Arch

[sphantom]

I actually find pacman to be a little better than apt/aptitude. Additionally, dealing with packages not in the standard repos tends to be a better experience in Arch.

On the flip side of the coin though, Arch feels a bit like Gentoo at times in that some tasks can require a bit of manual intervention.

Plusses and minuses to both I suppose.

Interesting post from Red Hat employee at Phoronix

[atomican]

Yes I know, Phoronix is a pretty scummy website at times with Michael taking credit for basically every new thing that happens to Linux, but there are some interesting posts on its forum when its users are not constantly fighting with each other.

AdamW (Adam Williamson, "the Fedora QA Community Monkey" according to the project wiki) posted this in response to this very topic:

It does always amaze me how people are happy to download an entire *computer operating system* and throw it at their computer - with valuable data on it! - without even reading the damn documentation.

For Pete's sake people, it's an operating system, not a new version of Angry Birds. You might want to read something about it before hitting the big red button. The F18 release documentation is pretty clear on the fact that the new installer UI is a first cut and still has rough edges: this isn't hidden information, it's called out in the release announcement itself. There's a guy on the Google+ thread who says "Not knowing that The World Had Changed, I downloded the DVD of F18 and tried up upgrade my machine" - where do these people come from? And what rock have they been living under while three thousand articles explained that F18 has a new installer? Sheesh.

So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list. It works fine. If you want a nice polished version of newUI, you might want to wait for F19 or F20. It won't kill you. An operating system installer is a psychotically complex lump of code, it is not plausible that you can entirely rewrite one and get it working perfectly on the first try, and we never aimed to. We aimed to have something that broadly implemented the new design and worked reasonably well in simple cases, and that's what F18 has.

GNOME 3 is GNOME 3. We package it up and ship it. If you don't like it, use something else; Fedora does not skimp on the choices.

(http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?77039-Alan-Cox-Calls-Fedora-18-quot-The-Worst-Red-Hat-Distro-quot/page4)

To which someone immediately pointed out the obvious:

Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?

This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.

Re:Alan Cox rants on G+! Film at 11!

[bill_mcgonigle]

People who use bleeding-edge testing distributions should expect the odd glitch

General rules of thumb (assuming a normal 6-month cycle):

A Fedora release is broken for the first 30 days. Things are rapidly fixed. Yeah, that should be beta, but too few people test. Personally, I can't have my daily work machines broken for beta, but I do install it when I'm on the previous release and developers are working on something that needs fixing that I need fixed, or when I have a spare machine I don't have to rely on.
Months 2-5 are where most of the annoying bugs get fixed. I usually upgrade my daily use machines around month 3.
Months 6-12 are where most people can use the system. I upgrade my wife's machine around month 6. She likes the snazzy new features in Digikam or whatever.
Month 12 is when you start to realize you need stuff that's going in the next version only.
Month 14 is when you realize that you forgot to upgrade to the next release when it was at month 6.

Re:Go Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work we purchase Debian support from HP. We're a huge HP shop, so all HP blades and storage systems (EVA 4400 and 6000). It's nice to have the same contacts for both hardware and software support. I don't understand why HP doesn't market this more.

Re:forgot RH7

[Tough Love]

THAT POS came with the bastardized !GCC 2.96, totally butchered by RH.

The most egregious abuse that Red Hat has perpetrated upon the Linux community in my humble opinion - and this is hard because there are just so many candidates to choose from - but the worst of the worst in my opinion is using script files for network initialization instead of designing some sane file format as Debian did. Thou shall not excute thy data unless thou be a LISP interpreter. Red Hat guys, please stop that crap, it's the level of design competence we might expect from Microsoft.

Re:Ubuntu, really?

[falconwolf]

I was fine with Unity and Gnome 3, liked them both. But I'm in the same boat as you -- compiz would crash and disrupt my workflow. Switched to KDE and I now have a different set of gripes and crashes, but not at the WM level. Better, but...sigh...when will it all work and have a nice integrated desktop?

Get a Mac if you want it to work. And if you want, some of the same software that runs in Linux can run in OS X too. It does come with X11. Fink [finkproject.org] installs .deb, Macports [macports.org], .rpm, and Homebrew [github.com] installs other packages. Apple also supports open source [apple.com] developers.

Falcon