Find your happy place: Fedora 26 has landed Fedora 26, released recently, is a welcome update on the already very nice 25. As with Fedora's last couple of releases, there are three major ways to get Fedora 26 – Workstation, Server and Atomic Host. The Workstation release is aimed at desktop users and, by default, will install the GNOME desktop. Server and Atomic Host …
Don't forget those other piece of RedHat hate
rpm's (people still go on about rpm hell even though it is mostly a thing of the past)
and
the annaconda installer.
Personally, I don't have a problem with any of them but others do get their knickers in a twist especially about 'systemd'. I've learned to grit my teeth and live with it. I don't think that it will be going away any time soon.
Fedora is nice but far too bleeding edge for my liking. I prefer CentOS.
I too prefer CentOS, as long as I'm allowed to stay with 6.X then I much prefer the anaconda installer, it does a good job working with servers with mixed disk technologies and setting up multipathing automatically. The RHEL7 anaconda installer isn't as good, The SLES 11 installer is pretty but has a habit of installing the OS on one disk and grub on another and is a pain to control just where grub will end up and the drive order definition, SLES12's installer has abandoned leaving you a nice autoyast.xml file and also stopped using the same UI for the installer and as the autoyast editor which I always thought was the best bit of SUSE. The Debian installer can be a total PITA on servers with different disks attached, I usually end up out at the shell to work out what's going on, thank the lords of the kernel for /sys. Preseeding would be much improved if there was any documentation worth the name, the installer saved a preseeding file for what you've just done and if they'd damn well read the preseeding file at the start of the install so you didn't have to pass options in through the commandline. ARGH!
I don't really find rpm hell to be any hotter than deb hell. Actually I find yum's dependency solver a lot less likely to decide to reinstall/remove whole subsystems when you pull at a loose thread. If you have to manage a lot of machines Spacewalk Server is also really nice; I'm not sure if Debianbuntu has anything similar to offer.
Grin and bear it.
It's like the New Deal: A total catasrophe implemented by crazies bringing nothing but pain & destruction that everyone will laud as the best idea ever after some time.
And truth be told, I am starting to appreciate it as it simpklifies life a lot in certain cases. It is the right direction to take. Not sure whether it is the right way to take it.
Let's do this. Installing KDE spin now...
I had a major catastrophe of some form with OpenSuSE LEAP 42.2. Initially I suspected a drive failure, that proved not be the problem. I was never able to track down the real problem - KDE, LEAP, ?, ? But the upshot was the system would not boot. It would hang consistently somewhere between the initial boot and the launch of KDE. No amount of tweasling would recover the system. So, I downloaded Fedora 25 KDE spin (on Windows alas), burned a bootable USB stick and installed Fedora 25. Plasma's idiosyncrasies are still irritating - no differentiating virtual desktops with different wall papers - but the system is snappy, runs everything I use, and wonder of wonders, I had actually recently backed up everything but three data files. Now running 26, by and large my impression is that it is solid, and less quirky than OpenSuSE.
It was a fairly quick update but I've been plagued with frequent GNOME shell crashes on Wayland which terminates my session entirely. At least with Xorg only the window decoration disappears and the then returns without closing my apps; it is much slower however. My machine is 4 years old but has been upgraded with an SSD and extra 8GB of memory, so I really have no desire to buy a new machine. Hopefully and GNOME Shell patch will come thru soon to fix the instability...
Quote: "I generally prefer to run GNOME with Fedora because the overlap of Fedora devs and GNOME devs is such that GNOME is nearly always just about flawless on Fedora"
*
While this might be true for Scott Gilbertson, it is absolutely not true for others like me. GNOME 2 was pretty good, and the people who replaced it with GNOME 3 seem (to me) to be completely clueless. That GNOME 3 has improved a little over time only proves that sometimes the clueless manage to acquire half a clue!
*
So all the machines in my life are happily running Fedora 26 and XFCE. Excellent!!
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