Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2014 13:13:28 -0400
Matthew Miller wrote:

> Saying something "sucks" isn't very helpful. Not only is it needlessly
> negative, it is intangible. Name a real problem and we can talk about it.

Every single aspect of it is a real problem. In the dictionary they
have a picture of it next to the word "disaster". The whole random
wheel/spoke thing is an invitation to forget to do something
important. And who the hell would think that "network" would be
the spoke where you set the system name? Why is the screen full of
blank space and cryptic meaningless icons when it could use
some of that space for valuable hints in actual text you can read?

> On the specific you do give, I'm pretty confident in saying that you're
> actually wrong.

And therein lies the problem. Everyone who worked on partitioning has been congratulating
each other for so long you can't see any problems. The partitioning is actually
absolutely impossible to use:

If there are multiple disks, it provides you only the size, model, and
serial number to distinguish them, as though everyone has that memorized.
Your only actually choice is to pick them all and hope you can see
a clue later.

After picking which disks to partition, you are presented with a single
choice: You can press the Done button even though you are not anywhere
close to done, or you can say "Screw this" and install a different distro.

Should you work up the courage to press the Done button, you then
reach the next layer of total obfuscation.

It names the partitions by what operating systems are installed on them.
Who the hell thinks that way? And where do I look for partitions that
don't have any operating system on them. Why not name them by the
biggest video file that lives on the partition or some other
random choice?

The adjectives "intuitive" or "useful" cannot be applied to any
part of this interface. It is absolute and total junk.

Our only hope is for redhat to use this in the next RHEL and
then we can probably get changes as wave after wave of enterprise
users descend on redhat HQ with pitchforks and torches.