Hi folks,
Congratulations for FC6, great work! I've been a long time RH/FC user ('95), so I'm pretty excited about this release.
That being said, it's been a very rough experience from the POV of a desktop experience. In fact, rather frustrating and disappointing.
Before I list the problems, let me just list a few datapoints: * I try to keep a clean install, as close as possible to standard * I use my desktop for email, browsing, VOIP, and hacking. * I don't need proprietary 3D drivers, no games. This is a very typical and non-taxing usage. Like for many (most?) people out there the email, browsing, CD burning, and VOIP accounts for probably 98% of what I need the desktop for.
So, considering this quite typical use case, this is what I get from the upgrade from FC5: 1. Sound stopped working on my Intel ICH5 AC'97 Audio Controller https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=216056 This killed VOIP on my box.
2. Evolution hangs when sending email https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208227 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208724 This renders Evolution almost entirely useless, making this a critical bug.
3. Evolution continued to not print email bodies https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186653 A long standing and crippling bug in a business environment where you receive invoices via email that you need to print.
4. CD burining in Nautilus is broken When clinking on the "Burn to CD..." button nothing happens for >30 of seconds, then dialog appears. Clicking on the drive dropdown to select another drive results in the same freeze lasting 20s or so. A non-technical user would have had to reboot the box!
5. Firefox starts using 100% after some time. No bug report here, as I haven't figure out what to report, but this makes browsing a painful experience. Slow, sluggish, with hangs that lasts 10s of seconds. Every time I close a Firefox window GNOME asks me if I want to kill it since it's not reporting, etc. Horrible.
Considering these bugs, what is left of my desktop? I can't use email, no sound/VOIP, CD burning is boken, substandard browsing.
I am not complaining about 3D drivers, fancy features, or Windows games, but absolutely basic desktop features.
My question is: Quo Vadis? Shouldn't these problem been caught by QA? Aren't these issues considered show stoppers for a Desktop distribution?
On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 17:30 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
My question is: Quo Vadis? Shouldn't these problem been caught by QA? Aren't these issues considered show stoppers for a Desktop distribution?
I have not experienced any of the problems you describe on FC6. However it may happen even on a clean install that a specific configuration triggers a bug that has not been detected or could not be reproduced during QA.
On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 05:30:51PM -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
- CD burining in Nautilus is broken When clinking on the "Burn to CD..." button nothing happens for >30 of seconds, then dialog appears. Clicking on the drive dropdown to select another drive results in the same freeze lasting 20s or so. A non-technical user would have had to reboot the box!
No bug number ? - Can you give me the results of "dmesg" when this happens and tell me what sort of IDE or SATA controller you have ?
- Firefox starts using 100% after some time.
Seen that with FC6, went away after I removed the flash plugin crap.
My question is: Quo Vadis? Shouldn't these problem been caught by QA? Aren't these issues considered show stoppers for a Desktop distribution?
You assume everyone has the same experience you do - FC6 for me for example burns CDs fine and evolution sends email (its about all that particular pile of garbage does but thats a large upstream problem not an RH packaging one). You might want want to investigate a better email client - eg sylpheed-claws.
I am interested in the CD one, thats something I need to know more about.
Alan
On Tue, November 21, 2006 6:06 pm, Alan Cox wrote:
No bug number ? - Can you give me the results of "dmesg" when this happens and tell me what sort of IDE or SATA controller you have ?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=216810
- Firefox starts using 100% after some time.
Seen that with FC6, went away after I removed the flash plugin crap.
True, it's probably related to flash, but I'm afraid it's no longer an optional component judging by how many sites I can't visit without it.
You might want want to investigate a better email client - eg sylpheed-claws.
The email client is a particularly difficult problem. I have reluctantly switched to it some time ago following RedHat's lead, and frankly now it's part of my business process. Changing it is non-trivial, and it can not be done on a whim.
From a pure user perspective, an email client is like a kernel,
it's so basic that you can't just change it left right and center.
What is the new direction for the email client? Is there one?
On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 09:10:36PM -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
Thanks
- Firefox starts using 100% after some time.
Seen that with FC6, went away after I removed the flash plugin crap.
True, it's probably related to flash, but I'm afraid it's no longer an optional component judging by how many sites I can't visit without it.
If you have the flash plugin loaded try a bit without - if that stops the hang try the flash 9 beta, and report problems to the flash folks as they ask so they can get the final flash 9 stable.
What is the new direction for the email client? Is there one?
Beats me. Evolution has things some people think are essential that the others lack, but its slow and nobody seems to be fixing the real bugs (eg the year old remote DoS I sent to bugtraq)
On Wed, November 22, 2006 6:47 am, Alan Cox wrote:
If you have the flash plugin loaded try a bit without - if that stops the hang try the flash 9 beta, and report problems to the flash folks as they ask so they can get the final flash 9 stable.
Thank you, I'll give that a try.
What is the new direction for the email client? Is there one?
Beats me. Evolution has things some people think are essential that the others lack, but its slow and nobody seems to be fixing the real bugs (eg the year old remote DoS I sent to bugtraq)
And don't people find this in the least worrying? A good email client is no longer optional nowadays, and AFAIU RHEL5 will ship soon. They can't possibly ship Evolution in this state.
Email is by far and away the most important tool in a business environment, and it's not an easy proposition to transition folks to a new one. You need something that works. If it crashes, for most people is equivalent to the entire system crashing, as they'll need to reboot the box to fix the problem. This renders the system worse than Windows 3.1.
If you really want to tick people off, mess with their email. I'd be _very_ concerned right about now if I were RHEL5 product manager.
On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 09:33:06AM -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
And don't people find this in the least worrying? A good email client is no longer optional nowadays, and AFAIU RHEL5 will ship soon. They can't possibly ship Evolution in this state.
Check out the last discussion we had on the subject. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-April/msg00197.html
Quick summary: People expect Evolution to be shipped with Fedora/RHEL. The fact that it doesn't work is completely irrelevant.
Emmanuel
On Wed, November 22, 2006 10:05 am, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
Check out the last discussion we had on the subject. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-April/msg00197.html
I know, I was part of that discussion :)
Quick summary: People expect Evolution to be shipped with Fedora/RHEL. The fact that it doesn't work is completely irrelevant.
Well yes, people expect it to be there because it's hard to switch email clients. It's certainly not a trivial undertaking, and it would be a major problem in any conceivable corporate environment. I'd go as far as to say it's simply a showstopper for desktop OS.
Now thing is that Evo in FC6 is orders of magnitude worse than in FC5! I mean, the bugs that were listed in the discussion you pointed at seem trivial in comparison. Right now it's not a matter that it's slow, or can't be used over slow links. No. Now it simply hangs while sending (or sometimes receiving mail), and the only viable option for a regular user is to restart X or reboot!
What good is an email client that can't send mail?!?
Well yes, people expect it to be there because it's hard to switch email clients. It's certainly not a trivial undertaking, and it would be a major problem in any conceivable corporate environment. I'd go as far as to say it's simply a showstopper for desktop OS.
Now thing is that Evo in FC6 is orders of magnitude worse than in FC5! I mean, the bugs that were listed in the discussion you pointed at seem trivial in comparison. Right now it's not a matter that it's slow, or can't be used over slow links. No. Now it simply hangs while sending (or sometimes receiving mail), and the only viable option for a regular user is to restart X or reboot!
What good is an email client that can't send mail?!?
I don't know that I agree with that necessarily. For what I use EVO for on a day to day basis (connecting to an Exchange 2003 server which can't be done using any other OSS client) Evo have improved considerably in FC6. It at least doesn't crash a couple of times a day when looking up email contacts. It definately isn't at the level I would like stability wise and I wish the developers were a bit more open and spent more time fixing bugs rather than adding things like cairo eye candy but at least I'm not at the stage where I was in FC5 where I'm downloading the developement src rpms and compiling them agaist FC5 to get something close to stable.
I really wish they would start to merge some of the dbus port that has been done that seems to include a lot of nice memory improvements and stability improvements etc. I also thought that redhat was looking to hire a full time evo hacker to help get on top of some of it (they may well have).
In general I like the feature set of evo I just wish that some of the long standing issues could be cleared up. The merge of the dbus branch would be a good start at least then there would be more developers working on the core branch rather than a fork of the project.
Peter
Peter Robinson wrote:
I really wish they would start to merge some of the dbus port that has been done that seems to include a lot of nice memory improvements and stability improvements etc. I also thought that redhat was looking to hire a full time evo hacker to help get on top of some of it (they may well have).
Yes, The current Evolution maintainer in Fedora is working full time on it.
Rahul
Am Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:06:03 -0500 hat Alan Cox alan@redhat.com (Alan Cox) folgendes geschrieben:
You assume everyone has the same experience you do - FC6 for me for example burns CDs fine and evolution sends email (its about all that particular pile of garbage does but thats a large upstream problem not an RH packaging one). You might want want to investigate a better email client - eg sylpheed-claws.
The DVD fc6 iso i burned with fc5 (double click in nautilus) does not go through the chksum test and failed in anaconda ;-)
I burned it with nero :)
Jörn Rink schrieb:
Am Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:06:03 -0500 hat Alan Cox alan@redhat.com (Alan Cox) folgendes geschrieben:
You assume everyone has the same experience you do - FC6 for me for example burns CDs fine and evolution sends email (its about all that particular pile of garbage does but thats a large upstream problem not an RH packaging one). You might want want to investigate a better email client - eg sylpheed-claws.
The DVD fc6 iso i burned with fc5 (double click in nautilus) does not go through the chksum test and failed in anaconda ;-)
I burned it with nero :)
This is because the chksum test does not honour the iso size and just reads /dev/cdrom until the end..
$ rpm -qf $(which isosize ) util-linux-2.13-0.45.fc6
2006/11/21, Alan Cox alan@redhat.com:
and evolution sends email (its about all that particular pile of garbage does but thats a large upstream problem not an RH packaging one). You might want want to investigate a better email client - eg sylpheed-claws.
Speaking of better mail clients, is there any out there that uses libebook? I don't like evolution-the-mailer but I quite like evolution-data-server, or at least the idea of having a unified address book.
Otherwise I'm tempted to actually run fedora-directory-server (*gasp*) as a glorified address book..
On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 17:30 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
- Evolution hangs when sending email https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208227 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208724 This renders Evolution almost entirely useless, making this a critical bug.
Happening to me too - evolutions hangs when it tries to connect to smtp.gmail.com and then requires a manual kill -9 to close it.
Richard.
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Alan Cox -
Dimi Paun -
Emmanuel Seyman -
Gérard Milmeister -
Harald Hoyer -
Jörn Rink -
Michel Salim -
Peter Robinson -
Rahul Sundaram -
Richard Hughes