Trends - how to save Fedora ?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 11/13/2011 05:35 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius writes:
>
>> On 11/13/2011 03:45 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> > On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 07:15:20 +0000,
>> > JB<jb.1234abcd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> every Fedora release is going downhill ...
>>
>> > If you are referring to quality, I disagree that they are going
>> downhill.
>>
>> Well, having spent most of this weekend with installing F16, I don't
>> sense any change in quality.
>
> It depends on where you're standing. If you follow the well-trodden
> path, of always doing a fresh install, not upgrading, and always taking
> the default filesystem layout, and only importing /home from the
> previous version, you'll be fine.
That's what I did (BTW: Older openSUSE and Ubuntu installation meanwhile 
openly ask their users to upgrade "on-the-fly").


The first issue was anaconda lumping together the swap partitions of the 
other linux installations, I have installed in parallel and anacondas's 
"custom disk layout utility" and it's custom partitioning GUI me not 
allowing the disk-layout I had wanted.
Afterwards, during installation, NetworkManager failed to bring the NIC up.

Later, I more or less was caught by issue others already discussed, 
earlier last week: T
* The broken autofs startup script issue,
* many issues with named (Meanwhile mostly working for me, but still 
having issues related to dnssec and IPv4)
* broken package deps in some packages (e.g. system-config-bind)
* finally many problems related to systemd ...

Currently bugging me:
... me not being able to get my parallel printer up,
... not being able to launch vsftpd through systemd,
... and some unfixed kernel bugs, which have been haunting me for 
several fedora releases.
...

On the positive side: One very nagging bug, I had reported years ago, 
finally seems fixed in F16's thunderbird. SELinux is not a bad as it 
used to be.

> But dare to venture off the beaten path, and, it's getting ugly. And I'm
> not talking about anything weird. Even something as innocent as having
> everything on raid1, will result in an upgrade to F16 (or even
> installing it fresh, btw) ending up as an unbootable brick.
... some time during manual post-installation cleanup, I was facing a 
failing X server. With F16, I ended up with a bricked system instead on 
a console (AFAICT, the culprit is systemd) - Great progress! The first 
bootup brick with Linux, I have experienced in for ca. 10 years ;)

> Having
> listed that as a known issue, is not an answer. Anaconda, in recent
> releases, have become advanced enough so even generally
> non-sophisticated users, with only a minimum of technical know-how, can
> build mdraid arrays.
... well, try opensuse's install for comparison, unlike Fedora's 
installer, it allows many ways of "fancy partitioning".

> It can be argued whether or not Fedora is losing mindshare, or not, but
> stuff like that is not helpful.
Well, my view: Fedora 15 and 16 are infected with an amount of poor 
and/or immature pieces of SW which are rending Fedora a bad choice for 
ordinary endusers and too be very demanding to "advanced users".

That said, I can relate to everybody who doesn't choose Fedora.

Ralf