This post is going to result in a lot of angry comments and emails. I know that. But I’ve gotta say this anyway:
The Fedora Project is screwing up. Big time.
In the most recent Linux Action Show, we get into the topic. And we get pretty worked up over it too.
The thing is: We have a special place in our hearts for Fedora. I think everyone in the Linux world has that same feeling.
But right now they are really, for lack of a better phrase, “screwing the pooch”.
Fedora 11 recently shipped. And it has some fairly cool new features.
Then you try to actually use it… and you notice the vast army of bugs that, somehow, made it into the final release of Fedora 11.
Here’s just a few highlights that I found simultaneously amusing and aggravating:
- If you have an NVIDIA graphics card (you know, like a huge percentage of the world), you are now defaulted to using the nouveau graphics driver (an open source implementation of the NVidia driver). Great. Except now you can’t do something simple like resume from sleep. That’s right, if you’ve got a laptop with an NVidia graphics chip? Screwed.
- In case you thought it would be safe to use an Intel or ATI/AMD graphics card? Think again. Both of these issues could have been easily worked around by simply not including a bleeding edge update for the drivers and XOrg. It’s almost as if the Fedora Project doesn’t care about actual functionality.
- The installer on the LiveCD is broken. Severely. For example, when partitioning your hard drive, a dialog pops up to let you go to the next step. Only the partitioning isn’t actually done yet. Simple bugs like this make the installation of Fedora a nightmare. In an effort to review this release (like we always do) it took 3 tries to get the installer to work in VMWare and VirtualBox.
- Your display might just simply turn on and off at will. Neat, right?
- There’s a new volume controller applet. Okay. That’s fine. But it doesn’t work for many applications. So, in order to adjust your system volume reliably, you need to add and use two volume applets at the same time. I am not freaking kidding you.
And this is just the top of the list of common bugs. Check it out for yourself.
If OS X or Windows shipped with these bugs the press and blogosphere would have a field day. Microsoft and Apple would never hear the end of it.
Okay, fine. So Fedora 11 is a crazily bugy release. At least they have their priorities straight and are focusing on bug fixing and improving existing software, right?
Oh wait.
Instead of fixing what they have, the Fedora project is ditching the tested and respected application, Tomboy, and replacing it with the Tomboy-clone Gnote (which was created so that people whose religion dictates that they must “Go forth and hate on Mono” can be happy).
Seriously? Fedora is barely functional and that is what the Fedora team wants to spend time on? Recreating functionality they already have for no good reason? (There was some talk about it being to “conserve on space”, due to mono being “super duper huge”, but that’s pretty flimsy. Anyone who’s been keeping up to date in the Linux world during the last year or two can smell the thinly veiled motives there.)
This is just plain frustrating.
Red Hat and the Fedora Project are responsible for so much of the various components of the Linux Desktop that we have today. Yet, at the same time, they are also responsible for so much of the splintering, duplication of effort, and bad public image that we have as well.
I simultaneously want to thank them… and make them stay after school in detention… and get them a tutor to teach them how to manage a large software project.
June 23rd, 2009 - 4:53 pm
Fedora didn’t recreate that functionality. Gnote is not a Fedora effort any more than Tomboy is. Fedora has simply packaged it as the new default note taking application.
June 23rd, 2009 - 5:30 pm
fedora’s releases are _always_ buggy - that’s part of being bleeding edge FFS. and if you notice, they’re doing a hell of a lot more than just gnote
June 23rd, 2009 - 5:46 pm
After reading a few glowing reviews of Fedora 11, I recently tried the Live CD (KDE version) on a very generic PC with an Intel motherboard, Intel 945 chipset, and Intel Core 2 Duo processor. On hardware that is completely supported by every Linux distribution released in the last several years, Fedora 11 managed to fail miserably, leaving the machine stuck at a text prompt with a warning message. I mean, come on, this thing has open-source drivers supported by the hardware manufacturer, and Fedora 11 can’t even manage to successfully configure X and get KDE running?
This is the fifth or sixth time since I switched to Linux in 2004 that I’ve tried using Fed Hat or Fedora. Every single time, the experience has been bad, and I quickly migrated away to an alternative distribution. Honestly, I fail to understand how in the world Fedora manages to stay in the Distrowatch top five.
-Gnobuddy
June 23rd, 2009 - 5:48 pm
Well, ditching Tomboy isn’t recreating functionality they already have, it’s swapping one program and all its dependencies for another and its dependencies. It’d be interesting to see how the size actually compares for all the Tomboy/Mono dependencies vs all the Gnote/Gtkmm dependencies. It may or may not be smaller but I’m too lazy to check.
In regards to releasing with bleeding edge versions:
*Nouveau: probably not the best choice to use it by default, but sooner or later, more and more distros are going to be including it by default since the default nv driver is considered by many to be crap.
*LiveCD: Worked fine for me, though. I have to admit, I didn’t use it exactly as most probably would use it (I installed GPartd with yum to do my partitioning since there were some other things I wanted to do to the drive first.)
*Volume: Really, they should probably include the Alsa controls too (I haven’t used F11 much ATM, so I don’t remember if they’re talking about in the main Volume Control or in the popup volume control)
*Blinking: A Gnome bug (be it one in a non-stable version of Gnome, but on the bright side it’ll help get more bugs fixed in Gnome before other distros start using it
Regardless, the argument is like saying, “WTF, they’re switching out Pidgin for Empathy? How could they! I like Pidgin better!” In all actuality, for a swap like that, it really shouldn’t take that much time to do, and can be done by a single person in a matter of a week or so if that’s all they work on in that time. (That’s a complete guess, but if the packages already exist, I don’t see much of a reason why it should take longer then that.)
Disclaimer: I don’t use Tomboy, and I have no idea how close Gnote is to being feature compatible with Tomboy.
June 23rd, 2009 - 5:50 pm
Oops, the first and second paragraphs should be swapped.
June 23rd, 2009 - 7:32 pm
[...] More: Lunduke.com » Fedora: Stop Screwing Up So Much [...]
June 23rd, 2009 - 7:47 pm
This Fedora “release” is in alpha state. Fedora has become the alpha/beta for RedHat proper.
I fully agree with your article. The hate is refreshing!
June 23rd, 2009 - 7:51 pm
“*Nouveau: probably not the best choice to use it by default, but sooner or later, more and more distros are going to be including it by default since the default nv driver is considered by many to be crap.”
The only good driver is the binary nvidia driver. It’s not only the best driver for nvdia cards, but the best driver for a graphics card on linux.
June 23rd, 2009 - 8:05 pm
I can’t complain as Fedora 11 is the only current distro to work fully on my laptop without any “work-a-rounds”, Even beating the most current Jaunty, Wifi and the intel driver don’t work properly at all in jaunty, but work great in F11.
I’m still an Ubuntu fanboy, running it most everywhere else. But I decided to give F11 a run and I am enjoying it quite a lot, although yum is greatly improved since I last used it in Fedora Core 4 -6 it still is crap (as well as the GUI for packages including their implementation for synaptic) compared to Apt. I do agree more work can be done, but in my case, with my hardware, Ubuntu has been quite the pain and Fedora this time wins.
June 23rd, 2009 - 8:17 pm
oh, boy. OK, this is rumour control, here are the facts.
#0 - measuring how buggy a release is by reading the common bugs page is not a good strategy. The F11 common bugs page is much longer than the F10 or earlier ones not because F11 is particularly buggy, but because I personally am a Big Fan of common bugs pages, and I personally wrote a big chunk of this one and encouraged lots of other people to contribute to it too. It’s simply that we’re doing a better job of documenting bugs, not that more bugs exist per se. (Take a look at the Mandriva ‘Errata’ pages; I wrote those, too. They’re freaking huge. Again, this doesn’t tell you anything about how buggy MDV is, necessarily.)
#1 - nouveau is really important, because it’s the only viable free driver for NVIDIA cards. nv is technically free, but it isn’t really, because the code is so heavily obfuscated that only NVIDIA staff really understand it. No-one outside of NVIDIA has ever done any significant work on nv. This is bad enough from a pure software freedom perspective - and remember, ‘freedom’ is the first of the four Fedora F’s - but added to that is the fact that NVIDIA having clearly been slacking off on nv lately. So we really need nouveau. We (Red Hat) have hired one of the main nouveau developers (Ben Skeggs) to work on it, and we reckoned now was a good time to make it default.
On this specific issue: two important things. One, it’s very easy to switch to nv or nvidia, so it’s not really right to say you’re ’screwed’ if this is a problem for you. The note explains right there how to change to nv, and using nvidia is documented in many places. Two, nv actually didn’t suspend / resume reliably on most hardware either. It only really worked on a very limited range of hardware. So this isn’t anywhere near as big of a problem as it might look on its face.
#2 - we care a lot about actual functionality, which is why we’re the guys paying most of the X developers.
Many of those issues affect all distributions; there’s nothing particularly Fedora-specific there. In fact, Fedora has a rather better implementation of the intel driver than other recently-released distros did at release time. Again, I’m just being conscientious about documenting issues here, so those who hit them have some useful information to refer to. None of the problems documented with Intel or Radeon on the common bugs page are objectively any worse than issues that were shipped in previous Fedora releases, or other distributions.
#3 - see http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/06/16/on-fedora-11-installation/.
#4 - it’s just a bug. It doesn’t affect a lot of people. This is a classic example of the kind of annoying bug that all distros ship with all the time, that we’re just doing a better job of documenting for F11. If you hadn’t read about it on the Common Bugs page you’d probably never know about it, after all…
#5 - you don’t have to use two volume control applets. If the simple, PA-based mixer doesn’t do the job for you you can just switch in the legacy mixer instead, you don’t have to use both.
Ubuntu used the same solution, only in reverse: they use the old mixer by default and have the new one as an optional package. Mandriva shipped their 2009 Spring GNOME release with only the new mixer, the old one isn’t even available as an option. Fedora isn’t an island here.
As others have said, gnote isn’t something being written by Red Hat staff or Fedora contributors. (It was started, actually, by Hubert Figuiere, who - ironically - used to work for Novell). It’s significant for us because of the GNOME live CD; it’s hard to justify taking a significant amount of space on that image (live CDs are always *very* short on space) for mono, solely for tomboy, so gnote is a nice solution to that problem.
Hope that clears up a few issues.
June 23rd, 2009 - 8:26 pm
“The only good driver is the binary nvidia driver. It’s not only the best driver for nvdia cards, but the best driver for a graphics card on linux.”
But they can’t really (legally?) just ship with the binary driver because of the license (not to even getting into the fact that there’s a good portion of the Linux community that don’t like proprietary/closed source software/drivers.) Like most OS’s with graphics 3D acceleration, it’s up to the user to get the nvidia 3D drivers. While, Intel & AMD/ATI drivers have at least some 3D support right out of the box (don’t know about Intel, but ATI’s open 3D support isn’t fully implemented).
June 23rd, 2009 - 8:58 pm
ubuntu has a list of common bugs too -> http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904
@Harley
They can do as all the other modern distros do - ask the user if he wants the proprietary driver and if he agrees, just download and install it.
June 23rd, 2009 - 9:25 pm
@bypasser
Where’s the edit button on Ubuntu’s common bugs?
As for the distro asking if the user wants the proprietary driver: On Ubuntu, it doesn’t just ask you if you want it, you /have/ to request it before it asks you. This isn’t really any different than not Fedora not shipping with it at all. And I guess I should have pointed out before that Fedora will probably never ship with/provide proprietary drivers (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations) If you really want the proprietary drivers in Fedora, it’s up to you to do it (be it grabbing it directly from Nvidia, or installing it from RPM Fusion.)
June 23rd, 2009 - 10:14 pm
Fedora has freedom as one of its fundamental values. Fedora does not include any non-free code, and won’t. Hence the non-inclusion of the NVIDIA proprietary driver. This is, of course, nothing new for F11. It’s not hard to install the NVIDIA driver on Fedora (it’s very easy, in fact) but if what you want is a distro that offers you proprietary drivers out of the box, Fedora is not your bunny. That’s fine, we’re happy with that. It doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong, it’s just a value choice.
June 24th, 2009 - 12:35 am
Isn’t comparing Fedora to OSX or Windows comparing apples to oranges? Maybe a more fair comparison is Redhat ES 5 to OSX or Windows Server 2003?
As far as the bug situation, I haven’t found a bug free distribution yet. It seems they all have bugs (new and old). Maybe linux in general needs more testing and quality assurance? You know, the kind that Redhat and Suse enterprise products provide.
Finally, doesn’t Fedora have reputation/goal of being bleeding edge? I think you may always be a little disappointed with Fedora/Redhat on the desktop. It’s great in the server room though (where Redhat focuses their efforts).
Agree on the mono issue though. I’m not a developer (I am the master of “Hello World!” in five languages though). I’m not going to get worked up about something that “might” be a problem.
Just my two cents.
June 24th, 2009 - 1:26 am
Whatever was wrong with changing to a live-DVD if space was a problem, Burnable DVDs are not much more expensive than CDs these days. The real problem here is that there seems to be people reacting to MS FUD. When Ballmer announced 235 patents in FOSS software he was never specific. In my opinion, the Patent bomb has been dropped and is being effective, the real bomb was the announcement and it is reaping its effect by dividing the Linux community, a long time ago a wise man said, a kingdom divided cannot stand.
Let us realize that FUD is just FUD and ignore it.
Its a shame that the programs I use and like are no longer included in the Fedora Default install and live CD, programs like F-spot, Banshee, Tomboy, Giver and Tasque, are ones that I use, and a lot of them are “best of breed”. I won’t be able to give out a Fedora live CD to my friends and have them enjoy the software I like.
I can see a KDE like migration away from Fedora to other distros, I think that Fedora is going to loose users over their decision and that is a shame, the artwork was looking very nice from what I saw. (I am installing it now to try out)
June 24th, 2009 - 3:36 am
so…Is this the year Linux takes over the desktop?
June 24th, 2009 - 3:48 am
I agree w/Tim Russel. I use it on most of my servers and have never had any problems. I have 3 F11 servers running fine in production already. Big fan of qemu-kvm
June 24th, 2009 - 5:12 am
Lundruke,
Stop screwing around so much. You have no clue about the motivations behind development of Gnote, ignore the advantages of it for Fedora and go on a stupid rant. You and Chris should be very ashamed of yourself and apologize to the project for your immature show. Learn to be professionals.
June 24th, 2009 - 5:55 am
Hi lunduke, I think you guys are making a big deal out of this Gnote out of nothing. The ranting you are doing is no better than the rants coming from mono haters. Why not have a discussion with the developer of gnote on your show? Or discuss with the person who made the decision of dropping tomboy from their distros live CD?
June 24th, 2009 - 6:01 am
Fedora is just like any other distro - buggy as hell. Hours and hours of repairing until it will work.
June 24th, 2009 - 6:55 am
Very interesting responses from Fedora
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-June/thread.html#00158
You apparently didn’t do your homework and acted very immature. Lame.
June 24th, 2009 - 8:15 am
I’m quite confused and can’t really understand what’s your agenda. To help or to hurt?
The Tomboy vs. Gnote matter is absolutely irrelevant and a distribution should be free to implement whatever application they have most confidence in.
The rant about nouveau driver is among the most contra productive I’ve read in a long time, implementing that you never understood the value of Fedora and its importance for Linux. Few of the big guns are willing to push development ahead, even if it means a bumpy road, to eventually reach a higher level. The nv driver sucks, and nouveau is the only promising project coming close to deliver an alternative to a proprietary driver (that goes through several issues time after another), an equivalent to what ati or radeon-hd is to catalyst. What you suggest here is plain complacency. How the heck should nouveau ever become a finished product if no one is willing to test it? You complain about bugs and then you still suggest that nouveau should be left out so even less persons will be testing it and hence result in more potential bugs?
Even though I’m not a Fedora user (running and administrating some but their not my own systems) this approach upset me (don’t interpret that as emotional because it isn’t; we’re dealing with tools nothing else). Other distribution usually pick up what the Fedora guys and gals have worked hard on accomplish. Sure it might at that time have a better functionality but why pick on the one that did the real work? To me it sounds like you’re not at all a person interested in innovating to improve. If that’s the case you’ve chosen the wrong bandwagon.
I’ve not run Fedora 11 so I can’t comment on that particular release. Nevertheless I can tell you this: I’ve installed far more Fedora systems when asked for a Linux client than Ubuntu ones. Why? I don’t intend to bash Ubuntu, because it’s probably a fine distribution, but Fedora has been able to auto configure far more systems correct than has Ubuntu. That’s only my experience and it’s not a universal truth, and I won’t write an article titled “Ubuntu: Stop Screwing Up So Much”.
…
The diversity is great for the ones who appreciate its value and are able to distinguish at what kind of users a distribution is targeted.
June 24th, 2009 - 9:53 am
@Harley
There is no edit button because the page is editable by ubuntu devs only.
Ubuntu DOES ask once if you want the proprietary dirver after clean fresh ubuntu install (not the live cd) and the driver is available in official repository. What was the last ubuntu version you tested?
The problem here as I see, is that the lundork guy doesn’t understand that nouveau driver is currently a replacement for the NV 2D driver, not the nvidia proprietary 3D driver (maybe it will become replacement for that too someday, but at least not in the near future).
BTW, the nouveau driver is available in ubuntu too (xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package) and canonical supports this project. It’s just that they don’t think that it’s currently stable enough to replace NV.
June 24th, 2009 - 11:12 am
Main issue is that Ubuntu is going commercial so they plan to make a deal with MS, if they haven’t already - you now, patent stuff. That’s why they’re FORCING mono in default install. Ahh, Ubuntu - just another sellout and betray.
June 24th, 2009 - 11:39 am
Oh shit… didn’t know F11 was that bad :\
June 24th, 2009 - 11:53 am
I’ve keep a current install of Fedora since my first FC4. I’ve used Ubuntu for the last two years. On my PC I boot to F11 and in two minutes I’m seeing “kernel crash being reported” screens. I’m using on-board intel graphics. I just punt and go back to Ubuntu. Later I read something that F11 does and try again. Same thing kernel crash reports and punt back to Ubuntu. Fedora 11 is not worth the trouble.
June 24th, 2009 - 3:59 pm
[...] his extremely pointed “Linux Sucks — Let’s Fix It” presentation of a few months back. Now he’s aiming fighting words at Fedora over F11, and from that I’ve gleaned a few larger questions about what is the real role of any given Linux [...]
June 24th, 2009 - 4:05 pm
[...] yesterday’s post on how I think Fedora is screwing up royally, I thought I’d follow that up with taking a look at the experiences of someone [...]
June 24th, 2009 - 5:39 pm
I’m testing the F4/LXDE edition on my laptop, and it’s pretty clean, no deal-breakers so far. I steer clear of Gnome and KDE generally, so I can’t speak of those implementations.
Having said this, I’ll probably be reinstalling Arch tonight. Possibly Slackware.
June 24th, 2009 - 6:15 pm
@somebody — you said:
“Fedora is just like any other distro - buggy as hell. Hours and hours of repairing until it will work.”
Clearly, you haven’t tried Slackware!
June 24th, 2009 - 6:48 pm
@ Harely
@ bypasser
The edit button is here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JauntyJackalope/ReleaseNotes
The Ubuntu Release Notes are put together in the open on the wiki, anyone can contribute. Once the release has been made they are copied over to ubuntu.com
June 24th, 2009 - 8:04 pm
The anti-Mono fascists in the FOSS community are really ruining things for a lot of people. Despite the fact that Mono is one of the most professional products available for Linux - and possibly the most productive for coding, especially if you’re from a Windows background - it gets excluded because of possible legal action that no-one seems to be able to quantify besides FUD.
Seriously, do the distro maintainers enjoy shooting themselves in the feet… repeatedly?
June 24th, 2009 - 8:11 pm
@Igor
Must read for mono haters -> http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/ .
And can you provide any citations or anything at least remotely official to back up your claims about Canonical making a deal with MS?
Long story short, diagnosis: freetard.
@JWJones
Clearly, you haven’t tried Debian Stable.
June 25th, 2009 - 3:36 am
@ 27 - my earlier post.
Thanks for the link to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#Miscellaneous_problems_with_ATI_.2F_AMD_graphics_adapters
That fixed my “Kernel Crash” errors.
@ Adam W. - the bug list says:
“To do this, add nomodeset as a kernel parameter”
It would help new-bees if you add “to the kernel line in grub” It’s not obvious to everyone.
I’m writing this in F11 using Firefox 3.5 (beta).
June 25th, 2009 - 9:39 am
I installed F11 on several machines. There are a few problems, but overall it works pretty well.
Fedora always needs 1-2 month after a release to become stable. That’s nothing new.
June 25th, 2009 - 12:12 pm
I could not be happier with F11, having installed it on both my workstation at work and my Sony Vaio at home. In fact, it was Ubuntu Jaunty that caused me to switch; from my personal experience *that’s* the buggy distro this time around. Jaunty’s nvidia driver leaves large black artifacts all over the place, and my workstation was simply unusable.
Kudos to the Fedora team; satisfied “customer” here.
June 25th, 2009 - 1:49 pm
It’s not hard to install the NVIDIA driver on Fedora (it’s very easy, in fact) but if what you want is a distro that offers you proprietary drivers out of the box, Fedora is not your bunny. That’s fine, we’re happy with that. It doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong, it’s just a value choice.
Ah, the old “we don’t like usability so we provide crap under the guise of it is free,” excuse. Something you’d expect to read from Debian and not a Red Hat employee.
June 25th, 2009 - 2:09 pm
@bypasser
Actually, I have tried (and use) Debian Stable (Lenny). My three distros (always running on at least one machine) are Arch, Slackware, and Debian. I’m a huge fan of Debian! Both Debian and Slackware are tops for stability, with the slight edge going to Slackware.
June 25th, 2009 - 2:20 pm
F11 has been the best install to date.
My only issue isn’t with F11 but the changes upstream to pam_mount from previous versions. Since installing it I have yet to see a crash or hick-up that wasn’t caused by some config file that I changed.
My only issues were with Anaconda install but that was fixed by a reboot and not using the DVD for a repository.
I use Nvidia and installed rpmfusion, installed the nvidia closed source module, rebooted and have been working in 3D since. Even the games are working great according to my kids.
Now to upgrade at work.
I have read enough issues with every distro, including the latest Ubuntu and video drivers.
As for the Mono issue. It isn’t that much different than the video driver issue. Until there is clear evidence that there are no legal traps, it will always be a problem. Even the link provided by @Igor, doesn’t provide any clear evidence that mono is legally safe to distribute.
As with any patent issue, lawyers will twist things to win their battles. The mono supporters have to get a legal statement from all patent holders involved to come out and say that there is no legal patent threat to all users of mono. Is that so hard?
June 25th, 2009 - 2:37 pm
I guess Fedoras chief crime is that they no longer drink the Mono koolaid ..
“Very interesting responses from Fedora”, jeffrey
“I’m quite confused and can’t really understand what’s your agenda. To help or to hurt?”, KimTjik
Lunduke is just another Usenet troll …
June 25th, 2009 - 9:53 pm
The problem with mono is that it looking more and more like a patent trap - and this uncertainty is a good basis for it and therefore Tomboy to be removed from any distro with a free software policy - please note that if you want to use mono, and Tomboy, and any other mono apps they remain easily installed from the repositories.
mono development has been undertaken with the assurance of a license from M$, which had worked until somebody actually requested said license. Until the paperwork shows up, mono should be considered a stalking horse and a patent trap for free software developers and Linux distros.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. BTDT
June 25th, 2009 - 10:29 pm
“teach them how to manage a large software project.”
Um… like “Radical Comic Designer” ?
June 26th, 2009 - 9:00 pm
I think the “leave GNote alone” comments are misguided. I think it’s pretty obvious that Brian is NOT with GNote whatsoever, but rather Fedora’s decision to expend any kind of resources on the Mono issue (or “issue”) as opposed to fixing the ridiculous bugs that shipped with 11.
June 26th, 2009 - 9:02 pm
Whoops… meant “obvious Brian’s *frustration* is not with GNote”
June 29th, 2009 - 8:08 am
@Ed
Mono is not really a patent trap. And seriously, if you want to go through the nightmare of getting paperwork from Microsoft, be my guest. To me, this satisfies me: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma%20PATENT/ECMA-334%20&%20335/2001ga-123%20&%202002ga-003.pdf
That PDF there is letters from both Hewlett-Packard/Compaq and Microsoft saying if the standard is approved, the patents licenses will be granted to anyone who asks. The fact that this took place BEFORE the MS-Novell agreement speaks volumes.
The ONLY parts people MIGHT need to be concerned about (but I doubt it) would be ASP.net, ADO.net, and Windows.Forms. And those parts can be removed at any time. Mono itself is not bad, it is just an implementation of the C# standard. Microsoft is not the only monopolist we use a programming language from. The C programming language came from AT&T, which is DEFINITELY a convicted monopolist, which was broken up into regional “Baby Bells” in 1984.
The problem with Fedora’s arguments against Mono is that there isn’t any substance. There are a multitude of ways to curb the space problem. One way is to include the GNOME “best-of-breed” applications that use Mono and not include their non-Mono equivalents. Additionally, cutting some of the languages included would work too. A majority of the distro is languages, not anything else. By removing one language, you have enough space for quite a lot of other programs. Finally, most computers have DVD drives now, and those that don’t can quite easily acquire DVD drives, they are extremely cheap nowadays.
Another way to solve the space problem would be to start offering a LiveDVD edition alongside the LiveCD edition, the LiveDVD edition can include all the applications Fedora needs to show that it is at the top of its game, and leave the LiveCD to be a more minimal Live image for older machines.
@Bryan
Fedora’s implementation of the intel, nvidia, and ati drivers are bound to be slightly buggier because Fedora is the only distro not using DRI1, they are using DRI2 instead. And despite this, Fedora’s intel driver is actually better than Ubuntu Jaunty, which says quite a lot against Ubuntu. By including nouveau, it sets the stage for when Gallium3D is finally set active in Fedora. When that happens, nvidia users may get some limited 3D support via the nouveau driver. For now, nouveau is just a better 2D driver. And of course, the nv driver has similar, if not worse problems, since it is so old.
I can’t really argue against the LiveCD installer because I haven’t even been able to boot the LiveCD in this release. Not in VMware, not in VirtualBox, not in QEMU, and not on real hardware. I don’t even see the kernel panicking, it just stops loading. It doesn’t bother me anyway, since I don’t use the Live CD because it is so limited.
@Everyone
You people need to realize that this release cycle was a very bad one. So many experimental things went into effect during this cycle. It is really just a set of bad circumstances. The next cycle in October will be better, hopefully. It better be, since Windows 7 and possibly Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” are coming out during the release period for most Linux distros on the 6-month cycle.
I have faith that eventually some reasonable people will step into Fedora and make things better before they get worse. For Ubuntu…. Not so much. I have a feeling Ubuntu will continue to bungle it until they start working on their next LTS release, which I believe is Ubuntu 10.04. After all, they can’t afford to screw up an LTS release.
July 1st, 2009 - 8:43 am
I’m starting to get the feeling that we need to treat odd releases of fedora as ones that are slightly more experimental. The reasons I see for this is because most of the work that comes out of the major free software development conferences seems to reach a semi-mature state by the middle of the year and a usable state by the end of the year. Fedora is just one of those distributions that merges that work in early despite some bugs.
It’s pretty important to notice here that what we currently have is the _only_ distribution doing the rewritten hardware stuff completely, which is, as a developer, I think really important because it allows you to get your code to a bigger userbase than you might expect faster because it is pre-packaged and this will get you a hellofalot more feedback for the things you need. (The average user and even developer would find it very difficult to try the KMS/DRI2/G3D/UXA stack - you have to compile about 30 different things from source, install them carefully and also apply reams of patches - seriously, I had to do it when developing input redirection patches for compiz).
Also a lot of these points are really bugs that are going to be fixed from the updates to the release right-off-the-bat. For example the screen blanking is a bug in gnome-power-manager which will be fixed shortly.
Also, I honestly don’t see why bashing the noveau driver is necessary. The nv driver is practically unmaintained and doesn’t do even do basic graphics operations like xaa acceleration, let alone 3D or S3. Noveau is miles ahead - it supports things like KMS, EXA and limited DRI2. If you really don’t like noveau, just like any other distro you can install the proprietary nvidia driver.
In the end, it’s probably not a good idea to bash the fedora project as a whole for a buggy release. As it’s been pointed out time and time again, fedora is for people who like the bleeding edge and don’t mind having to manually do a few things to work around glitches.
(BTW, @King InuYusha - you hit the nail right on the head: well done!)
July 4th, 2009 - 4:13 pm
Lunduke ,
Stop complaining dude. And please do try to act mature.(not childish)
July 8th, 2009 - 8:08 am
Fedora does suck the big one. Don’t listen to the ex-mandriva fan boy, Red Hat just uses Fedora as a ” proving ground”. No drivers, no Flash, yum locks up ect,ect.
Get real Fedora! Mandriva or ubuntu run out of the box. I install Mandriva on most laptops I repair, and folks just love it.
July 8th, 2009 - 9:50 pm
Whomever made the decision to start with firefox 3.5 beta as the default browser should be removed from all decision making. VMware only works if you recompile it with a user community hack (and then only barely, you have to actually force kill -9 to stop it). I tried virt-manager; it doesn’t work at all with vista (well, it freezes nicely on install with the background). I installed xp and it was so slow to install I thought it had crashed during install. Once it did install it was so slow that it was laughable. Myeclipse doesn’t work unless you modify kernel parameters to allow more open files (which is fine, but was still a pain to figure out). Sound? worked in 10, 11 doesn’t recognize anything. No codecs at all? bleh. Don’t even bother installing into an existing 10. I crashed my laptop doing that. Installed with a clean system. Crashed the first time. At least installed the second time.
Once up and running it was so slow it was unusable. Oh, and it was the first time I’ve seen my linux desktop actually FREEZE (on multiple occasions).
What a trainwreck. I wanted to use it, because I liked 10, but was so annoyed and frustrated with this I dumped it all and went with ubuntu 9.04.
bleh.
July 11th, 2009 - 7:32 pm
I find Bryan’s comments to be tiresome and tedious. Yes - we know who you are, and we are all very impressed.
October 11th, 2009 - 12:32 pm
Hmm?
Installed Fedora 11 on my Satellite 350. Install went without a hitch, had it up as my main OS (XP dual boot) for some time now. Not a flicker or a sign of a problem with anything I’ve done. Particularly impressed with the way it found and set up all three of my networks (wired, wireless, and Vodafone 3G) without any help from me. I haven’t done any updates yet and feel disinclined to do so just in case it breaks something. I’m a great believer in “If it isn’t broken don’t fix it” ;o)
October 17th, 2009 - 7:35 am
I’m glad someone agrees with me. As a matter of fact Fedora is officially the buggiest distro ‘ever’ for me and yes I’ve used em all from Ubuntu to Gentoo but fedora always wins. Keep up the good work Red Hat.
February 10th, 2010 - 3:12 pm
Well, fyi fedora 12 sucks big time too. Neither virtualbox or vmware actually works - vmware server don’t even installs. Fail big balls.
March 20th, 2010 - 2:34 am
I had an absolutely abysmal time with F11; I’ve been using RedHat/Fedora stuff since RedHat 5, and this was the first release I just plain couldn’t use at all. On a more positive note, F12 was the first release that just worked right out of the “box”—I installed and started up without having to twist its genitals to get it working nicely, which surprised/impressed me much. Of course, as the updates have rolled out, the bugs have rolled in (my video has been approaching teh sux more and more closely, for example) but it’s sure better than F11 or F9.
That said, I really don’t get their design decisions. I’ve come to terms with their love of Python, which breaks system-wide at the slightest provocation. I’ve made my peace with the fact that every new component needs a bunch of inscrutable XML files, and that those XML files will be placed in the last place I expect to find them.
However, they seem to love using brand-new software that’s not tested terribly well, provides critical system components, has almost no documentation, and is nigh impossible to configure in any update-resistant way. This is partly also just a Linux symptom, but every new release there’s some new service half-assèdly emulating the original piece of software and providing its own, brand-new interface. Many of the usability issues raised about recent releases relate to these components, and the impetus for using the newer components seems to be driven by The Pretty, which I would hold in more importance if Linux were properly a desktop OS (except under severe duress), and But Everybody Else Has It, which I would hold in more importance if Everybody Else Had nicer stuff.
Still, I’ve used primarily RedHat/Fedora distros since day 1, and I’ve tried most others; with the exception of F9 and F11, I far prefer RH/F over the others. (Although by this point, using another distro is like waking up drugged and naked in somebody else’s house. :P.)