What's wrong with Fedora 21 GNOME?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 10:15:06 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:

> I've been running gnome on what will become F-21 using my "production
> work laptop" since mid April with out any major issues WRT to booting
> or any of the core functionality.

Compare that with several attempts at trying to upgrade F20 to F21 since
early July. Is any script still checking for and reporting upgrade path
violations? I'm not convinced that a distro-sync upgrade is bullet-proof.

Rawhide has broken into pieces regularly before that. It's still a dumping
ground, where packagers release builds they haven't even tried to start
themselves.

> In terms of "various forms of systemd/plymouth/gdm breakage" I don't
> remember ever in this cycle having my laptop being unable to boot.

Symptoms not present with F20:
 - the gray X login screen appears, but no users are displayed at the centre
   (some race or stale state after shutdown problems?)
 - systemd is stuck in a loop waiting for 4-5 items, such as devices during
   shutdown or reboot - no patience to wait for more than two minutes!
 - the small fedora logo animation fills up till its completely white, then
   nothing happens because systemd is waiting for something, pressing reboot
   keys doesn't lead to anything
 - a freshly upgrade F20-to-F21 only booted to the maintenance prompt or
   couldn't decrypt the LUKS home -> upgrading from non-updated F20 to F21
   has helped more than once

> I don't think you really can comment unless you actually have been
> evaluating daily.

Please don't say that. My latest installation is from Aug 14th. Still I fear
the risk that it will destabilize further. While writing this in Emacs and
moving windows, suddenly the Emacs window (with focus) was stuck behind
Claws Mail and could not be moved in front. Switching virtual desktops
back and forth, eventually it worked again.

$ rpm -qa --last|tail -3
gpg-pubkey-246110c1-51954fca                  Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:37:50 PM CEST
prelink-0.5.0-1.fc20.x86_64                   Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:24:18 PM CEST
aic94xx-firmware-30-6.fc20.noarch             Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:24:13 PM CEST

$ rpm -qa --last|grep fc21|tail -3
gnu-free-fonts-common-20120503-9.fc21.noarch  Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:46:55 PM CEST
dejavu-fonts-common-2.34-3.fc21.noarch        Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:46:55 PM CEST
fontpackages-filesystem-1.44-10.fc21.noarch   Thu 14 Aug 2014 06:46:54 PM CEST