The Spherical Cow lands, spits out Anaconda Fedora 18, Spherical Cow, is here. Finally. The Fedora Project has never been one for precision roadmaps, but previously it has managed to stay pretty close to its official May and October release schedule. Spherical Cow, however, proved to be a difficult beast - it is nearly three months late. The numerous delays can be …
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It's only a name for an ongoing free product. It's not like they renamed RHEL to Furry Messy Tits is it?!
Famine, death, rape and murder in the world, losing it over the name of a piece of software should be way down the list of things that light a fire under someone! Ease back to decaff for a few days, eh?
Bit confused by this article to be honest. Right now, on my laptop I have Fedora 17 with GNOME 3 on it. Without any tweaking (because for me it worked right out of the box) when I click on the Activities button it automatically shows me all of my open windows. I stress, I haven't tweaked Fedora to do this, it has been doing this from the moment I installed it. This leads me to wonder what sort of background or past experience the writer has with Fedora.
The general feeling I get from this article is that the writer really didn't hold much hope for Fedora, and would rather be using Ubuntu or something with a bit more polish. By all means, if you want a Linux OS that looks lovely and pretty use Ubuntu or Mint. But, in my honest opinion, Fedora is aimed for the developer and/or system admin who isn't after screen candy.
Agreed, that nonsense about now showing open windows had me wondering if the author has ever used Fedora before and I lost all faith in what he was saying.
As for the "only experienced users need apply" comments, Fedora 17 works perfectly for my gf who was on Ubuntu untill they decided to turn it into spyware. She's had no problems with the transition and likes Gnome 3. Admitedly she had me to set it up for her but I didn't think it any harder than the Ubuntu or Win7 installers.
"Those posts bring up visions in my mind of usability labs where developers bring in their girlfriends to do the testing."
I could bring in my girlfriend, but she's a Ph.D. student working as a Linux developer in a lab that's doing computational modeling of the human brain, so that might not be the best possible test case...
@James Hughes 1
"So installing a new distro and learning a new desktop was easier than just turning off the Amazon thing in Ubuntu (about 5 buttons clicks)?. Who would have thought it."
Who said it was easier?
When Ubuntu started spying on it's users then a lot of them decided to leave it. Why should anyone believe an 'off button' actually does what it says?
Not easier.
More proactive. Which is what open source is all about.
It's like the people who buy locked down Amazon tablets because they think they are getting a fantastic deal with a lower price subsidised tab and the ability to hack a proper version of Android on it.
Not understanding that what they are really doing, is encouraging the sales of locked down company owned gear that will keep getting harder to hack as the years go by. When they could pay a few quid more for an ordinary tablet, or get one a few months later, and have the same power, but with an untarnished OS, and a wallet vote for user access..
It's about making choices. Not about making the easy choice.
Canonical is trying to monetise Ubuntu.. Not a problem. I wish them all the luck in the world. I really honestly have nothing against Ubuntu.
Canonical is trying to isolate Ubuntu users.. Problem.
Different desktop.. Slightly different file structure. Soon, more and more paid software that will be non transferable across OSs..
The question to ask yourself is..
Are you the frog that has noticed the funny metal puddle getting a little too toasty, or are you the one holding onto that frog's leg, because it isn't that hot yet.
Personally, I've had more than enough lockin products. So I go out of my way to avoid them these days.
I installed Fedora 18 on a VM just to see how it worked. I liked everything, although I didn't try to install optional software on it. But, the Unity like desktop of Gnome was just as irritating for me to use as Unity or for that matter the so called Metro of Windows 8.
On the plus side, I got to use Samba 4. It was great, and I wish other distros would upgrade to 4.
Just a few thoughts about 2 hours spent.
A virtualisation solution that won't run a mainstream Linux or FreeBSD out of the box is one I would avoid. Although I haven't tried with Fedora, I would guess that either qemu-kvm or virtualbox would do so without a whimper. With MS, although they are not agents of the devil, one always must wonder whether there is an unpublished agenda.
I've had no problems running up a virtual server with Ubuntu Server 12.04 on Hyper-V from scratch, and that just worked straight out of the box. A previous versions (10.04) needed a quick tweak once base install was done to get networking going, but with 12.04 there were no issues at all.
Im so happy MATE is included in the repos to start with, and is now officially supported. Its just great, simple desktop for people wanting to work on their machines in my opinion. I run MATE on my Ubuntu machine, im not bothered about the amazon stuff to be honest i turned it off when i first started running Ubuntu.
To me the interfaces mean nothing on a distro, that can be easily changed. Package manager is generally my biggest thought. I love apt-get, yum is great but i have get more dependency issues when installing RPM's i find.
Give Cinnamon a whirl before you make up your mind. And remember to check again in six months or so, because both Mate and Cinnamon are moving fast. A few months back when I tried Cinnamon it crashed far too often to be usable. Now it seems quite stable. Nice once again to have a choice of desk-tops that behave like desk-tops!
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I tried to upgrade my local server last night using the new "fedup" tool (appropriate name), since they've removed the old preupgrade method.
It downloaded over 3000 packages before prompting me to reboot to perform the upgrade. Rebooted, let the upgrade run (took about 2 hours) after which it rebooted, and then failed to boot properly. Freezes at some point fairly late in the boot process and becomes completely unresponsive.
Guess I'll be booting a live CD at the weekend to see if I can tell what happened from the logs and then do a clean install from DVD (something I've been putting off since around Fedora 10 as I didn't fancy re-configuring this machine from scratch).
I really don't get this RPM bashing that comes up from time to time. I have always run Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia and have never had any sort of issue at all with RPMs. The whole point is that the package manager takes care of it for you. The fact is that RPM is every bit as good as yum or deb or anything else, it's just different.
Well, yum and rpm are kinda connected.
"yum is an interactive, rpm based, package manager. It can automatically perform system updates, including dependency analysis and obsolete processing based on "repository" metadata. It can also perform installation of new packages, removal of old packages and perform queries on the installed and/or available packages among many other commands/services (see below). yum iis similar to other high level package managers like apt-get and smart."
"rpm is a powerful Package Manager, which can be used to build, install, query, verify, update, and erase individual software packages. A package consists of an archive of files and meta-data used to install and erase the archive files. The meta-data includes helper scripts, file attributes, and descriptive information about the package."
sure they're connected in that RH includes "yum" to provide installation of RPMs, just in the same way as Mageia includes "rpmdrake". Like the original poster I also have never had any problem with dependencies using Mageia (and its precursors), so perhaps RH devs are the source of the problem by incorrectly setting up the packages in their RPMs whereas Mageia devs are getting things right.
It may have been released, but it's still a bit flakey.
So far I've only tested using VMware but some time during the beta phase something went seriously wrong with GNOME in that it fails to boot in to the logon session. Even now, using the official Live CD or the full ISO in a fresh install in a VM it won't complete the boot if GNOME is the chosen desktop - which is awkward since it's the default desktop. KDE or xfce install fine.
One other nit I came across. The official install uses kernel 3.6.10 but the already available patches will upgrade to 3.7.2. The kernel headers installed for 3.7.2 are missing some header files. For a VMware installation where you want to add the VMware tools, the lack of a version.h will stop VMware tools being installed.
To my mind they've got fixated on the fact that they were 3 months late according to their initial release date and pushed it out to just get it out there. It's still a work in progress.
While perhaps not having a too bright future, Ubuntu has been very useful for me to learn a few lessons:
- Better be late than buggy. Nobody in the enterprise world (that is in his/her right mind of course) bets on upgrades or projects using the latest version of anything, so being late three months is inconsequential. Much less for the home user. Whereas releasing with a buggy installer or critical unsolved defects really destroys the experience for new users.
- Diversity is good. Very good. In spite of the Unity and Gnome 3 progress, there are lots of people that don't like those. No problem, there are alternatives: KDE, MATE, Cinnamon to name a few. Were we using a proprietary OS, we'd be doomed to use whatever the big bosses wanted to put in the box their next release. And no, holding back upgrades is not viable in spite of what people like to convince themselves of. If you keep running Ubuntu 9.10 or Windows XP you are missing the additional HW driver support, the additional graphical niceties, the overall OS speed increases and the security bug fixes.
- We are still not very good at marketing in the non server space. At least from what I see in my environment, Linux is still spreading mainly by word of mouth. But no one has found the right message yet to convince users to switch.
The fact that you can have your lowly five year old laptop used at home for browsing, email, Spotify and playing multimedia and transform it in a couple of hours from a trembling Windows house of cards that struggles to barely work at all to a rock solid Linux OS that keeps working for years without performance degradation or security issues is not widely know.
Just hoping that Spherical Cow doesn't end being Spherical Horse...
What usually kills me in the RPM world is that if you want stable you have to go RH/Centos and endure the lack of software pre-packaged, or you go to Fedora & Friends and touch wood.
It is perhaps me, but I can always get my way much more comfortably with any Debian/Derivate than any RPM based distro.
Hmmm.
Spherical Horse: a contaminated version of Spherical Cow. Someone starts with cow, adds the non-free repositories, and re-ships with a default install set including copyright-encumbered codecs and suchlike. Lawyers wouldn't sue someone with no money ... would they?
Spherical Beetle: like the above, but also feeds everything you search for to Amazon, so you can be bombarded with appropriately targeted adverts. (Beetle ... bug ... )
Spherical Rat: the sometimes-rumoured Microsoft Linux.
So don't use it. the time for shouting and screaming because they took away the familar Gnome 2 interface is gone. You can now have Mate (Gnome-2 derived, but moving to Gnome 3 libraries underneath), or Cinnamon (layered on Gnome-3 in the first place). Both are now stable enough to use. Both are close enough to desktops as we know them that no-one should be too unhappy.
You can also choose Scientific Linux or Centos 6.x which still use good old Gnome 2 and offer at least five years' future support thereof.
Is this article really about Fedora 18, or more about "Fedora sucks, Ubuntu RuLeZ!"? I'm asking 'cuz I can't really tell.
I'll give Ubuntu another chance after they give up on being spyware.
Oh, yeah, about GNOME 3: I am particularly fond of GNOME 3's Desktop layout design, where you are greeted by what appears to be an icon vomit. Then you can click on "Activities", whatever that means.
Not to mention that, even on a Core7 with a 2GB super-beefy NVidia card plus proprietary video driver blob plus 16GB RAM, it still takes at least 10 seconds for any click to respond. Horrible design ideas gone bad.
Not to say that Fedora is perfect. Yes, the package manager UI lacks in features compared to the one from OpenSUSE - as an example. However, I'll take Fedora over Shmubuntu any day.
Ubuntu is slick?
Must have missed something - someone please let me know why its considered slick. I installed it for Steam, but it soon got into a horrid mess and wouldn't play DVDs. I know, I went for "Testing" but it has stayed broken for quite a while.
I ran screaming from Gnome3 in Fedora and my ubuntu system no longer plays DVDs for some reason. OpenSuse may lag a bit but I love Yast with its "nearly everything you need to configure your OS and GUI/desktop can be found here" approach. Dual KDE/XFCE desktops suit my different moods, but I wish they would get their install-to-iscsi installation system working.
Me? I'm using KDE, which seems to be just fine for me. Yes, it has quirks and seems to grind away at resources, but it does work, and thankfully doesn't have those silly cashews floating around the place. Browsers and office applications work with both styles of desktops and there isn't much difference there, the differences are in the "minor details", for me I just want out of the way.
Yes, I use F17 (presently) with KDE. It works just fine with my style. F18 with a new installer? I'll have to see. Maybe in a couple of months when F19 comes out I'll switch then.
Every time I've tried Fedora, I wound up installing something else the next day as yum was mind numbingly slow. To those of you who are yum apologists, when yum is still contemplating it's navel after other package managers have finished downloading updates, that's slow.
Synaptic starts downloading updates within 5 minutes for the post-install update. Does this in Ubuntu, Mint and PCLinuxOS.
Yum spends several hours apparently doing nothing for several hours when I try to do the post-install update. I don't know what its doing but it ain't downloading updates. Experienced this in several versions of Fedora.
I don't care if yum is doing a tremendous amount of busywork that first update. Busywork is not UPDATING and it is updating I want to have happen. Other package/update managers actually DO the UPDATING while yum fiddles. Therefore yum is slow.
"Yum spends several hours apparently doing nothing for several hours"
Well that is clearly nonsense, just as quick as apt. As the comment says below clearly your doing something wrong. Post install update will never take hours unless your connection is very very slow. All it takes it is:
sudo yum update
You will be updated just as quick as apt.
Just put F18 in a VirtualBox VM to try it out and it's still seems a bit half-baked to me.
Anaconda is *terrible* now. I mean seriously bad. It was buggy in F18 Alpha and those issues seemed to have been ironed out, but none of the usability problems have:
* EVERYTHING IS IN CAPITALS FOR NO GOOD REASON. As the El Reg screenshot shows, they title everything in shouty capitals rather than bolding it or something not so horrible.
* The review mentions MATE and Cinnamon, yet neither of these are offered as desktop options in Anaconda at all. Considering MATE is officially supported and installable via yum, this is quite a poor move.
* Talking of customising the package installs, any chance to refine it above some broad categories doesn't exist (probably hasn't for several Fedora releases anyway).
* The disk partitioning section is now actually far worse than the old (and not very good) Disk Druid-type section we've seen in earlier Fedoras. I always do custom partitioning and can't say I like the default of LVM, but at least I worked out how to change that to a standard partition. Units are mixed with abandon (XX.YY GB and XXX.YY Kbytes right next to each other!), it took me an age to work out how to add swap space and also how to allocate the rest of the remaining space on the device to a partition (answer: leave the size field blank).
* You start the installation only to be told you haven't set the root password (shouldn't that have been asked for *before* you clicked "start install"?).
* No ETA for installation completion during install and don't believe it displayed either the version numbers or sizes of the packages it was installing either.
After installation (I chose GNOME), you're presented with a blank desktop, an Activities menu, a few icons in the top right and that's it. Quite a poor first impression from GNOME 3 immediately there - having to click on Activities to make icons visible is simply a ludicrous default. The thing is, at this point, you have been given no alternative clues about MATE or Cinnamon - neither are offered to you either before login or afterwards.
Every release of Fedora seems to make it harder and harder to bring up a terminal window, which isn't good considering that people think of it as one of the better distros for developers. It's Activities -> Some non-obvious dotted grid (hover to find it's "show all apps" apparently) -> System Tools -> Terminal. Yes, that's two clicks on the left, two on the right - *4* clicks to bring up a terminal window :-( Yes, I know there are other ways, but they involve keyboard *and* mouse, which is even worse.
So I get the terminal up, complete with stupidly tall title bar/menu (no divider between the title bar and menu doesn't help!) and a yum grouplist as root finally shows what was stupidly hidden by Anaconda - all the alternative desktops! So it's time for yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" and 108 (!) package downloads/installs later, I have MATE installed (it installed Thunderbird which surprisingly doesn't seem to be in the default GNOME install!). It's here I see something that I raised a feature request about - it looks like RPMs are downloaded in parallel, which is nice. It does lead to a bit of confusing cycling of the parallel download names as they are in progress though.
I might be too frustrated at this point, because I can't find the logout option in the menus (only restart/shutdown), so it's a restart then. A new "Session..." option appears pre-login and I can choose MATE now. Still the stupid 2-panel that later GNOME 2 desktops have (you only need one panel otherwise you are mousing up and down like a mad person), but it does look like MATE is customisable in a very similar manner to GNOME 2 e.g. the right button is used, there's a panel and desktop icons, all of which are improvements on GNOME 3 :-)
Conclusion - if you can struggle past the awfulness of Anaconda and install MATE using yum, this might be a half-decent environment - the first Fedora since F14 that hasn't massively disappointed me.
> The disk partitioning section is now actually far worse than the old...
Always has been the Angry Leprechaun. I don't know who codes this or what the design decisions are that go into the high-level goal of "Anaconda, work out what the user wants", but the end result has been consistently horribly surprising, wrong and annoying.
When you find out how to do it, write it down! Myst without the pretty graphics....
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