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

[Bill Davidsen]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> 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?
>
I'd love to give detail of how badly it sucks, but just as an example, I had a 
machine with fc14 and fc17 installed. They shared /home, swap, and 
/local/appgrafix. Trying to get rid of fc17 and put in fc19 or fc20 also sharing 
those partitions was a long futile endeavor trying to find the "do what I say 
and shut up" option. Nice to protect people who don't know what they're doing, 
but the whole effort to overcome the protection was a waste of half a day using 
man pages, shared doc, wiki pages, search engines, and mailing list postings.

>> 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:
>
I won't waste time agreeing point by point, I'll just agree that anyone who 
didn't write this or help develop it is likely to do things the way you wanted 
or go elsewhere. And frankly if I wanted someone making decisions for me I would 
use Windows.

> 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.
>
I hate to say it, but enterprise users will either use it as the great crimson 
chapeau thinks best, or figure out how to game the system, or go to another 
distro. Only the last and least desirable action will be visible to management.

Doing real installs on real machines, complex stuff with hardware and software 
RAID, other things already on the disk, etc, installs by a mix of people coming 
from Windows admin, old hands who expect the old way, and fresh from RHEL6 
without any help but the docs which come with the machine.

Very few admins do a lot of installs, at peak I doubt I did more than 30 a year, 
and almost all servers, so few will be install gurus. If Fedora is to be the 
icebreaker for RHEL, it has to be better.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot