It is said that thanks to Fedora’s half yearly release cycle, you always get to use cutting edge technology. Bleeding edge would be more appropriate and it is no surprise that some RPM repositories do have a branch labeled ‘bleeding’.
Every Fedora upgrade introduces more problems than it solves which makes you wonder if this is any different from Windows. The new features are usually not even worthy of a blog post and an upgrade never goes smoothly. So why bother? Well each time I install a new version, I sweart that I will skip the next upgrade but after six months of using a buggy OS, you get tired of it and want to get those problems fixed the new version will usually do that but introduce a new set of problems.
The major issue with the current version F11 is that X server keeps crashing for no apparent reason. Ctrl-Alt-backspace (annoyingly disabled in most new xorg versions, you need to enable it by editing the key mappings) will not kill the server. Ctrl-Alt F2 , F3 etc will not get you a console. Yet the machine is not dead. You can very easily SSH into it from another computer. You can even kill x from the shell but X refuses to die. Well it does die but the screen does not change. It remains steadfastly stuck on the last screen that you worked on. Even those annoying Ajax spinners are frozen for once. The only fix is to go all the way down to runlevel one and then do an init 5 from there. But who has the patience of all that stuff? I usually just hit the reboot button.
So my desktop, which once upon a long ago would run continuously for weeks at a time, now needs to be restarted several times a day. One sad day, X crashed thrice. Surely even m$ can do better than that?
If that’s not bad enough the update makes things worse. X wouldn’t start at all. There is absolutely nothing in the Xorg.log file either but it would start up when you type startx from the shell! explain that!!
I suspect the reason has lots to do with F11 and F12 RPMS getting mixed up. Each Fedora installation leaves an unbelievable number of packages from the previous version lying around. This version has left 581 F11 rpms behind. The worst was when the first 64bit version came out. There were so many 32bit RPMs left behind that almost nothing would run, even the boot process got stuck.
In the past I got so fed up with fedora that I even tried Ubuntu and Debian only to find that they are even more annoying.
first of all, i wonder why people like you use fedora which is always experimental and buggy. you could instead try mepis and pclinuxos for desktops, and debian and centos for servers.
If you read this blog carefully you will find that I have tried most distros. Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, you name it; I have used it. Centos *is* what I am using on my servers (please check the archives). As for PCLinux OS well, I am sorry but this hasn’t registered on my Radar but I will check it out. Thanks
Yes, last days I have two very sad experiences with F12. One PC with 380MB ram started with text install, that is extremely dumb. The result was that F12 erased all my partitions and has put lvm there. The installation ended with level 3 – text. Knowing yum enough, I have installed X and gnome. The result was blank screen. I would be able to solve that (how much annoying it is), but I cannot swallow that lvm thing and I dont know the way out.
2nd – I did upgrade from F10 with DVD. Anaconda did the stuff, my home and other partitions remained intact. It booted into blank screen. No ctrl-alt-fn, just catching the grub (delay=0), singleuser and my own xorg.conf.
Yes, why do they leave the things that work? I dont understand why the install the garbage like was beagle and now packagekit. While uninstalling beagle was smooth, packagekit was fighting.
All my F11 installs were ok. I have tried also debian, but it is a bit harder to get the spirit.
Annoying to say the least. As you say, Red Hat’s policy seems to be to take out working packages and replace them with half baked products that need a few hundreds man hours of work for it to be even remotely usable. PackageKit is a classic example but it isn’t even new anymore. Remember when upstart first arrived on the scene?
well, that is the point of fedora. its a development playground where new ideas are trialed and tested to see what people think of them, and to get more testing / bug reports from a larger user base. If you dont want to help dont run it, or if you dont mind the experimental nature but prefer a bit more stability than bleeding edge (as I do myself) then sit one release behind current. As the support cycle covers the last two releases thats a decent place to be. I only installed fedora 11 after fedora 12 had come out, and found after bringing it up to date it was fine from there. However ive just tried f12 on my work machine and found its still too green for me. 3 screens on nvidia with 64bit kernel is proving very buggy
The point of fedora is cutting edge technology, yes. But it most certainly isn’t shipping products that are known to be completely and utterly broken and/or useless