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back to article Fedora 22: Don't be glum about the demise of Yum – this is a welcome update

The big news with Fedora 22, just delivered, is the Fedora project actually managed to stick pretty close to its proposed schedule. Fedora 22 arrived just one week later than scheduled – but what's a week after the month-long delays of the last few release cycles? It would seem that the recent top-down restructuring of the …

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  1. Richard Lloyd

    No MATE love?

    I'm a bit surprised that the option to install the MATE desktop wasn't mentioned in the review at all. The first thing I did when running Fedora 22 in a VM was:

    dnf groupinstall "MATE Desktop"

    Logout and then when you select your user from the login screen, click on the non-obvious gear icon and select MATE as your default login. Your login should now give you a GNOME 2 look-and-feel which for us die-hard users is, just, well, better.

    Mind you, if you're not a fan of Fedora's lunatic 6 month update cycle (this is not and never has been a good update interval for any OS ever - I'm looking at you, Ubuntu, too) and the need to upgrade every 2 releases, I'll point you to CentOS 7, which has 10 years of support and once you enable the EPEL repo, also has the option of the MATE Desktop.

    13 0 Reply

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  2. Dr Trevor Marshall

    Why deprecate?

    Brilliant news: you can still type "yum install mypackage,"

    note to developers: Why deprecate the YUM script in future versions? Heck, I can still run vi if I want, why not yum?

    4 0 Reply
    1. BitDr
      Reply Icon

      Re: Why deprecate?

      When they consign YUM to the dustbin, at a bash prompt, enter the following;

      alias yum=dnf

      There, you can now continue using yum.

      Put it in a startup script for so it is always there for you. OOPS!! They'll probably depricate "alias" now... can't have anyone using it to keep their old habits alive now can we?

      3 1 Reply
  3. Paul Crawford Silver badge
    Unhappy

    "Nautilus, the default file browser which has about 30 per cent of the features it once had"

    And that kind of sums up the whole GNOME 3 experience. In fact it seems to sum up the majority of GUI changes these days, pointless tinkering with eye-candy and the removal of features that some up-their-own-arse developer decided you didn't really need.

    33 0 Reply
    1. BitDr
      Reply Icon

      plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

      The trick is to recognize when things do not need to change, and when they do.

      Nautilus under Gnome 2.x, and Caja (horrible name) under Mate use(d) Del to send selections to the trash (from which they could be recovered). Shift+Del actually deleted them in one go with no easy recovery.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Phil W
        Reply Icon

        Re: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

        Are you suggesting that Shift+Del for permanent deletion is a bad thing?

        It's a fairly common key combo for that effect in a variety of systems, it exists in Windows explorer and Outlook. It's not like the 2 keys are close together and you could accidentally press both.

        2 0 Reply
    2. Dazed and Confused
      Reply Icon

      Sod what people need,

      > decided you didn't really need.

      Like there is no option in the GUI to just have a plain background. These people have clearly never remotely managed a system. The color options all have a subtle and stupidly large noise bitmap. Plain colour background might be dull dull dull'sville but they go at a sensible speed.

      5 0 Reply
  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
    Linux

    DNF

    I can't help reading that as an acronym for "Did Not Find"

    I assume the notification for terminal processes has some sort of minimum time. Otherwise

    cd wherever

    <notification>

    ls

    <notification>

    ls|grep foo

    <notification>

    could get a bit tedious.

    5 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Re: DNF

      DNF = Did Not Finish

      I haven't checked, but is this more line art pottering?

      5 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: DNF

        dnf install blah

        Do Not <expletive> install blah!

        3 0 Reply
      2. RAMChYLD
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: DNF

        I thought it meant "Duke Nukem Forever".

        1 0 Reply

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        2. TeeCee Gold badge
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          Re: DNF

          If that were the case it wouldn't actually be around to deprecate yum with.

          It'd have a rumoured release date some time later this year (and next and the one after that) and actually turn up some time in the mid 2020s.

          0 0 Reply
      3. The Brave Sir Robin
        Reply Icon

        Re: DNF

        Did Not Finish

        This has been my experience with dnf. Gets almost to the end of a dnf upgrade and then just hangs.

        0 0 Reply
  5. keithpeter Silver badge
    Windows

    Scroll bars

    I popped Fedora 22 workstation on a recycled Dell Latitude E5420 i5 Sandybridge laptop with intel graphics (and an atheros wifi card, I swapped out the Broadcom).

    Gnome 3.16 seems fairly snappy to me. The new scroll bars on 'native' applications take a bit of getting used (hint: middle button to scroll). Firefox and LibreOffice are not 'native' and use scroll bars you can actually drag. I like the new notifications.

    Default filing system is btrfs for / and xfs for /home, and the installer default is to set up LVMs and grab around 60Gb for root. I usually go for ext4 and a single partition. I find customising partitions on the 'spoke and wheel' installer requires some clicking around, and the 'make more space' command is downright confusing as it actually deletes partitions.

    You have to enable the RPMFusion 22 repo to actually play music or anything as per usual in the RedHat world but that really is a 'just click a couple of times' job.

    Yum: I used to use yum -localinstall sometimes but can't find the corresponding command in dnf. Not sure if the mirrors plug in is functioning or not in dnf updates, I did see a few time-out errors when updating and installing.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      @keithpeter - Re: Scroll bars

      yum localinstall is an alias. Just use yum install with a rpm file name instead of a package name.

      0 0 Reply
  6. Herbert Meyer

    confirmation buttons

    The confirmation and navigation buttons are on the top of anaconda because of nitwits like me, who have a netbook with a 1024 wide x 600 high display, who complained about an earlier anaconda, with the buttons at the bottom where esteemed personages, like you, think they belong. I complained because the buttons were invisible on my lowly system. I remembered what the interface guidelines said about tab order, what says, on linux systems, the 'OK' button is the second to last button, and worked by feel.

    You, as an esteemed personage, have never read an interface guideline in your entire life, leaving it to lowly tech drudges as I, who view them as Holy Writ, and actually try to follow them. So uncreative.

    You would, under such circumstances, would have unable to install the product, and written a scathing review.

    5 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      @Herbert Meyer - Re: confirmation buttons

      How about giving you the option to scroll down for the buttons ? Nah, they're Fedora team and they can't be arsed to do that!

      0 1 Reply
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is it not possible...

    to configure where and how (and if) notifications appear on Gnome?

    Ditto for the <Del> key passage. Are shortcuts not configurable?

    1 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So what does DNF do better than yum? And do so much better that we need a new thing to download and install packages and dependencies - I assume this means no more rpm? If not I don't really see much point.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      It would appear that it makes life a lot easier for developers and distribution people and that's about it atm. So why bother getting rid of the yum to dnf symlink ever, admins will just re add it to save having to rewrite all their shell scripts.

      0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So what does DNF do better than yum?

      And does it still sit on top of the buggy libcurl which takes for ever to start FTP transfers, often being a thousand times slower than wget for the same transfer, or just using HTTP with curl?

      0 1 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is DNF any faster than Yum?

    Not that I care - Fedora's got bigger problems, like systemd.. no thanks.

    2 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Watch out!

      Systemd pushers are very sensitive people, you will hurt their inner brogrammer genius.

      2 0 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gnome3

    When will the hate end? Granted it was once a bit shit but these days theres nothing wrong with it.

    Its clean, fast and largely out of your face.

    Its not bad, really, its not. Its the most consistent DE ive used recently.

    Ive tried XFCE, and whilst its nice and fast it just looks and feels a bit lacklustre and can be hilariously inconsistent. Having lots of apps open in various states of "theming" is crazy at times. MATE is ok but feels a bit dated to me. Cinnamon is great but I find after a while it starts to wear me down. Unity is solid as well, I just hate having to remove stuff after an install so the Amazon stuff bothers me.

    Im rocking 3.16 and its never held me back. Its the only DE that doesnt get in the way and allows you to just get on with things. You dont have to fiddle around with it. It just works.

    Honestly theres nothing taken out that I miss from Gnome2. I did love Gnome2

    As for Nautilus, it should be simple. Ive always done advanced file management from the terminal, it feels safer that way.

    The only things that wind me up are the lack of transparency on terminals and the fact the workspaces are vertical instead of horizontal.

    Multitouch support would be nice as well.

    As for Fedore its the distro I look at and wish it could be simpler. I hate the default security set up and ive never liked the package management, ive always got on better with deb packages. With this new package manager I might give them a look in again.

    AC because...well...ya know.

    As for systemd...haters need to shut up. Its not that bad.

    Climb off your tyres and stop flinging your shit around.

    0 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gnome3

      "It's not that bad" says an anonymous noob who cares about *terminal transparency*...

      Gnome3 isn't bad from a casual user perspective, though it takes some getting used to. The problem is its web of dependencies, including systemd and its dependencies. This is a complex, fragile, un-adaptable system. Piss-poor engineering.

      0 1 Reply
    2. finalzone
      Reply Icon

      Re: Gnome3

      "As for Fedore its the distro I look at and wish it could be simpler. I hate the default security set up and ive never liked the package management, ive always got on better with deb packages. With this new package manager I might give them a look in again."

      Default security is fine as it is. Applications must adhere to that policies as the hard lesson with Portal 2 steam bug on Fedora 20 shows to avoid possible security vulnerabilities.

      The package management of Fedora runs smoothly and some Debian users prefered to deb . There are no much difference of packaging format between rpm and deb, only the policies and packagers behind. I personally find rpm packaging much easier to maintain with only a single file to generate source and binary.

      0 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gnome3

      Terminal transparency is feature I find very handy. Its regularly handy for being able to see a window beneath the terminal for reference purposes. Especially for doing manual comparisons and so on.

      Its a huge productivity advantage as far as I am concerned.

      0 0 Reply

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