Fedora Project Releases Fedora 24 Beta; Stable Version Comes Next Month (betanews.com) 78
A month ahead of its final release, Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 24 beta for users and enthusiasts to try. An anonymous reader writes: The workstation version -- the one most home users will target -- offers GNOME 3.20 preview as a desktop environment. The GNOME environment has improved leaps and bounds over the years, becoming one of the best UIs of any operating system. Wayland is available as preview, but not default. The display server protocol is still poised to replace X, but it will not yet be ready for Fedora 24. The team explains that it should be ready for 'future versions'. Whether that means version 25 is something that remains to be seen."We're pleased to announce that Fedora 24, the latest version of the Fedora operating system, is now available in beta. The Fedora Project is a global community that works together to lead the advancement of free and open source software. As part of the community's mission the project delivers three editions, each one a free, Linux-based operating system tailored to meet specific use cases: Fedora 24 Cloud Beta, Fedora 24 Server Beta, and Fedora 24 Workstation Beta," said Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader.
VNC (Score:1)
Will it *finally* allow me to use Gnome via VNC without the dreaded "Oh no, something went wrong?"
The Alpha has been stable so far (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you wondering if the Beta is okay to use, I'll share that I've been running Fedora 24 Alpha since it was released at the end of March, and the Alpha has been stable for me. I'm looking forward to installing the Beta this weekend.
(My Linux system is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, 1st gen.)
Re:Did they (Score:4, Informative)
You're a vocal minority that is shrinking. I know several Linux admins who have changed their minds about systemd once they started writing scripts for it.
Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, Arch, and Mint all default to systemd, are planning to, or have it as the only option in the most recent versions. Gentoo maintains it as an option. Among major distros (for various definitions of "major") only Slackware seems not to have moved yet. One could call Amazon Linux AMI a major distro given its relatively widespread use, but IIRC it's based on RHEL6, so the next version could easily use systemd.
That list will grow as other software starts using systemd by default instead of an option. You can continue resisting systemd, but it will require a great deal of ongoing work to do so.
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I use Fedora and CentOS 7, so I'm using systemd on every system I touch now. And it's annoying, I certainly prefer the simplicify of the old init system. I'm really not sure what problem this was
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This is such a mindboggling position for people to take. The entire concept of open source is about flexibility but people think it's fine to blindly force one option down everyone's throats, regardless of what they want. It's surreal to watch. We have 9,000 distributions but only One True Init, apparently. I use Fedora and CentOS 7, so I'm using systemd on every system I touch now. And it's annoying, I certainly prefer the simplicify of the old init system. I'm really not sure what problem this was supposed to solve. Everyone talks about fast bootup times, but my servers uptimes are measured in years. Why should I add all this complexity to save a couple of seconds a year? I've spent hours reading about and learning systemd, to gain what exactly? And I'm not saying no one should use systemd. If it solves some problem for you, great, use it. I completely support you. But why don't you also support my desire to use the init system that I want to use?
This isn't Microsoft or Apple, nothing is forced down anyone's throats. Use Slackware or Devuan if you want to avoid systemd, or hack it out of whatever your preferred distro is. Just please stop acting like it was forced upon you and you had no recluse.
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If everything and the kitchen sink is required by systemd then it is shoved down our throats. Why can't we use both like we did before. Linux was all about customizing, not locking your users into using your software or else switch distros. This should not be a goal. Things need to be flexible in OSS, and systemd is not flexible, I'm sorry it just isnt.
Only in the same way X Windows and glibc have been "shoved down your throat".
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So do your own. The entire concept of open source is flexibility, and absolutely nothing is stopping you. Distros making decisions inherently remove some flexibility for the sake of delivering a functiona
Re:Did they (Score:5, Interesting)
So do your own. The entire concept of open source is flexibility, and absolutely nothing is stopping you. Distros making decisions inherently remove some flexibility for the sake of delivering a functional platform.
This is highly specious reasoning. systemd's developers' stated intent is to standardize (read: take over) all userspace initialization. They've accomplished (much of) this through a combination of embrace and extend, land grabs, intentionally breaking unapproved setups, tying functionality together unnecessarily or for highly trivial reasons, arm-wrestling other distributions with self-fulfilling prophecies, and generally being assholes. In fact, they've been doing many of the same things that Microsoft did in the late 90's with browser integration and which we all fought heavily against.
As a result of this, though, and partially as a specific result of their policy banning the packaging (and even OPTIONAL packaging) of initscripts at distro level in Fedora (the subject of this article), that it's become more and more difficult to revert out of it. Nothing may be *stopping* us (hence forks), but it's being intentionally made more and more difficult by a complete ass. Don't pee on my head and tell me it's raining.
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The entire concept of open source is about flexibility
"flexibility" does not mean "the community will do your work for you." It means that you have the means and the right to modify the software that you use so that it works the way you need/want it to.
You still have those means and rights.
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While your comment is true, the Unix/Linux philosophy grew from do one small thing well and interoperate. Even extra keystrokes were omitted in the interest of keeping things small and fast - rm, cp, mv, ls and the like come to mind.
systemd is getting its paws into everything. I too see a use case for some of its features - particularly for mobile users. But their ease of use has really made a mess of some interconnected servers. I'm sure that this will settle down as the code base gets more stable and qu
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Open source is not immune to consensus, if a given way to do something is used by a vast majority, it will become the standard. The positive aspect however is that the standard will never be forced on you, as it in having no other options, it would just become more and more difficult to deviate from it ad the non-standard user base's numbers dwindle. So your best course to have a viable alternative to systemd is to build a consensus on it, and the best way to do it is through technical merit.
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The entire concept of open source is about flexibility but people think it's fine to blindly force one option down everyone's throats, regardless of what they want. It's surreal to watch. We have 9,000 distributions but only One True Init, apparently.
No it's not, never has been and never will be. Open source provides you the flexibility of choosing from a subset of system components and applications that a distribution provides and maintains for you. This has always been the case since the early days of Linux distributions. This is fundamentally the reason why we end up with different distributions and forks of distributions. It is also the reason why there's so many choices (not flexibility, there's a big difference between the two) out there.
This exte
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What I'm saying is, most distributions support multiple window managers, multiple desktop environments, multiple anything, but only one init system. Why?
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Because a window manager is an app which just sits in the system. The init system is a core component that requires support and co-operation from every app. It's the same reason why you will have one underlying tool chain / library, i.e. which distributions offer you the choice between glibc, eblibc? None, well Linux from scratch and Gentoo if they count.
You most definitely do not get "multiple anything", you only get "multiple pluggable independent programs that are easy for distributions to maintain". Ev
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Yeah, right. Doesn't sound suspicious at all. No sir, I'm totally going to take your word for it. Or maybe your "Linux admins" are converted Windows hacks who know as little about Linux as they did about Windows? That could explain it because something about systemd makes me think of svchost.exe more than anything else.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical are all growing, and the usage share for RHEL/CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu have all risen as well. Where are all these hordes of systemd refugees that anonymous cowards on Slashdot keep telling me about?
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Maybe you haven't noticed, but a lot of us oldtimers went to various kinds of *BSD, and some even left for Windows, since when the choice is between one monolithic piece of shit and another one, you might as well go with the popular choice. And even if I sincerely doubt that systemd, as you are implying, is responsible for the increased usage of those distributions, it's not a counterargument against my objections against systemd, at all. In fact it makes perfect sense that people who feel lost without svch
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And that's good for BSD, but it's still a shrinking number of people. If there are as many holdouts as are claimed, we should be seeing a striking rise in the use of non-systemd distros, or of BSD variants, but so far as I can tell, we don't really see that.
You're probably right. The use of those distros is partially responsible for the rise of systemd, not really the other way aro
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Maybe you haven't noticed, but a lot of us oldtimers went to various kinds of *BSD, and some even left for Windows, since when the choice is between one monolithic piece of shit and another one, you might as well go with the popular choice. And even if I sincerely doubt that systemd, as you are implying, is responsible for the increased usage of those distributions, it's not a counterargument against my objections against systemd, at all. In fact it makes perfect sense that people who feel lost without svchost.exe but want to try something new feel right at home with systemd.
I'm not saying systemd is why those companies are growing. They're growing at roughly the same rate they did before systemd. I'm merely pointing out that the gloom and doom apocalypse predicted by the anti-systemd anonymous cowards didn't come to pass.
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There are several dozen distros that have not moved to systemd. You're free to use any of them.
Tutorials become outdated. This happens with Windows tutorials, Linux tutorials, and BSD tutorials. It's the nature of the moving target that is technology. The ones you mention might still work on some distros, but not on some of those that have moved to systemd.
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So, why aren't there any protesters outside Red Hat's office? Why do people keep coming to Red Hat Summit? Why do they keep switching to RHEL 7? Maybe you're actually wrong and that not that many people actually have a problem with systemd. I mean if it actually pissed of so many then maybe we would see more of that outside of Slashdot and the likes, you know out there in the real world.
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So, why aren't there any protesters outside Red Hat's office? Why do people keep coming to Red Hat Summit? Why do they keep switching to RHEL 7? Maybe you're actually wrong and that not that many people actually have a problem with systemd. I mean if it actually pissed of so many then maybe we would see more of that outside of Slashdot and the likes, you know out there in the real world.
Don't really want to stir the pot here but my 2 cents are this. People are protesting in their own way. I've seen a huge uptake in BSD lately. But you're right that RHEL is growing. I attribute that to a lot of people simply not knowing or caring about the issue.
I happen to like systemd. I do not like the developers. I find them to be childish amateurs with extremely poor people skills. I also have huge problems with Lennart trying to replace the core OS with systemd. He's given presentations to this effect
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because it makes creating and maintaining a distro easier. No other reason. It adds nothing to security and very little to functionality that wasn't already being done elsewhere.
If that were the case then there would be very little reason people were upset about this. Systemd is a ground-up rethink and change away from how init operated. It also gobbled a huge amount of other parts of the system up and put them under it's wing.
It's different. Very different. It has wildly different functionality matched only by projects with a similar scope that were trying to do the same thing for all the same technical reasons. To claim it adds no functionality and has no technical merits is down
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You are doing something very wrong then. Having the knowledge, it takes me no time to setup openbsd. Depending on what I want it to do.
The reason it takes you so much time is because you haven't bothered to learn it. You learned Linux instead, a systemd version of Linux to be exact. So basically you have stepped backwards, you went from using Linux to Windows(systemd makes Linux more Windows like), then brag about how smart you are.
If you can't set up an openbsd system in less than an hour then gtfoh and go back to Windows. Seriously have all the good Linux admins disappeared? Once you know Linux then learning openbsd should not be that hard.
For fuck sakes.
All fine and dandy if I'm just using an old desktop as a server with a tty; OpenBSD isn't hard to set up for that. But the driver, audio, wifi and gfx support are WAY more advanced in Linux, such that everything "just works" if you install it on a laptop.
KDE (Score:2)
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But the KDE spin of Fedora has never worked right. All of Fedora's system management stuff works through Gnome, and is flaky - or downright non-functional - in KDE.
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I have to say I enjoy KDE, but it seems plagued by crashes for me.
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Only remaining good window manager on any platform.
A bit pedantic, but it's a "Desktop Environment", not a "Window Manager".
KDE includes a window manager, KWin. I don't think anyone can really say it's the only remaining good window manager, but it's arguably one of the good ones.
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Which version? V3 which I still prefer.
Huh? (Score:1)
"The GNOME environment has improved leaps and bounds over the years, becoming one of the best UIs of any operating system"
"becoming one of the best UIs of any operating system"
"one of the best UIs"
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"one of the best UIs"
Yeah... that's why the first thing I do on my Fedora and RHEL installs is switch to Cinnamon [wikipedia.org]. Yes, it is/was Gnome-based. But with all the crack-addled BS fixed, and everything that should work just does. No need to install a bunch of shell extension to get semi-sane behavior from a desktop.
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"one of the best UIs"
Yeah... that's why the first thing I do on my Fedora and RHEL installs is switch to Cinnamon [wikipedia.org]. Yes, it is/was Gnome-based. But with all the crack-addled BS fixed, and everything that should work just does. No need to install a bunch of shell extension to get semi-sane behavior from a desktop.
Look into Budgie instead. Cinnamon is unsustainable. The Mint folks rarely make commits to it, mostly because they lack the expertise. Budgie is a more realistic alternative to GNOME with longer term ambitions. Its very usable right now also.
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"one of the best UIs" - my favorite annoyance.
It is among the top 100% of interfaces available, ever. Even far into the future.
It's not a lie, it just means literally nothing. I frequently use it to backhandedly compliment someone's fave band or food.
"One of the better UIs" would mean it is better than at least one, so I use that instead.
Some honest thoughts on Gnome 3.20 (Score:3)
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it's still rather agonizing to have to use the stupid activities page
So, launch it in "classic" mode, or use the tweak tool to enable the applications menu. The only thing I use the activities page for is switching workspaces.
the lack of menu buttons is equally frustrating.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean here. If I were, I might have suggestions.