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    Fedora 18 with KDE ... someone's sure unhappy

    http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-18-kde.html

    . . .
    Fedora 18 comes with a new installer - provided you get it to run. What is immediately apparent is a somewhat over-large interface with would-be friendly fonts and sizes and shapes. And there on, it gets worse. You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe in this most important of software configuration steps.
    . . .

    It gets worse once you hit the installation destination nonsense. You get disks represented visually. That's it. Not by their names. By identical icons with labels that refer to actual disk models. Not /dev/sda or /dev/sdb, which is what you expect. No. You get the manufacturer's model strings. And I happen to have two identical disks. So which is which? I'll give you a hint, the two disks are shown in reverse order, /dev/sdb first, /dev/sda second. What moronity.

    Again, you get that orange warning, and the hyperlinked disk summary and options gives an empty screen. And then, on the right, an option to Encrypt the disk. And look at the lovely position of that element, how it aligns so well with everything. Then, you have the Done button at the top and a grayed-out Continue button in the right-bottom corner. WTF?

    And we're still not done. Now comes a dilemma. What happens if you select a disk and proceed? Is it going to be formatted? Is it going to be erased? What will happen to my data? The system has four operating systems already installed. Holy banana, I'm crapping solid cubes right now.

    The next thing that happened is - I selected the first disk, at that time thinking it was /dev/sda, and then, another orange message popped up, telling me no bootloader was selected. Again, WTF? How is this my fault in any way? What the hell is going on?

    Now comes the best part. After pressing Continue, which was no longer grayed-out, even though the Done button in the top left corner is still available, Fedora complained about space. Just look at the message. Amount of free space:, nothing, next line, You don't have enough, and so forth. Lovely jubbly. The Partition scheme configuration lets you do LVM, RAID and standard partitions. And then you can check that box saying, I don't need help.

    The only way to continue is to click Reclaim space. There's no option to cancel and add more disks or to modify software selection. Which reminds me, what software selection? How much s*** can there be in one installer? And what does Reclaim space do? Does it instantly modify partitions?
    . . .

    In all my life testing Linux and other operating systems, I have never ever seen an installer that is so counter-intuitive, dangerous and useless, all at the same time. And the worst part is, it follows some fellatious mantra created in the sunny vale that has no value in our four physically proven dimensions.

    Smartphones? No problem. Ever installed one? Yes. You use an external software running from some laptop or something. You do not dual or multi-boot. You do not mess with data, as it is stored on an SD card you take out. And you definitely do not partition or care what happens. So can you imagine what comes out of an unholy marriage between the desktop installation and smartphone logic? Yes you can. You just saw it happen. And I would rather be violated by a honey badger than have to redo this installer crap. CRAP!
    . . .
    Wow.

    #2
    First impression: That's a fine and impressive rant.. Sounds like it's well justified though.

    Second impression: Honey badger doesn't give a <bleep>! (damn, that meme is stuck in my head now)
    sigpic
    "Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
    -- Douglas Adams

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      #3
      Jesus....I guess I can cross Fedora off of my potential OS list.

      Comment


        #4
        I know dedo (back to 2005 or so) to be a good guy, competent, and credible!
        Last edited by Qqmike; Mar 17, 2013, 06:52 AM.
        An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski

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          #5
          The last Fedora Distro I used was Fedora 7. The reasons I switched to Kubuntu were:
          1. The Fedora forum seemed to be mostly oriented to those using the Gnome desktop, and I was using KDE. The answers to questions on the forum would almost always tell you how to do something in Gnome.

          2. I was on dialup at the time, and yum was incredibly slow.

          3. Repository hell. There were two repositories that provided non-free addons such as our Medibuntu. Some packages were in one, some packages were in the other, and some packages were in both. If you had both active, there were often conflicts.

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            #6
            I tried to install Fedora 18 on a spare partition when it was released but the installer had me so confused I gave up. It worked fine last year with Fedora 16 or 17 (don't remember which). As I recall though Fedora17's grub didn't like Kubuntu and visa-versa. Grub 1.9X vs 2.0? Whatever.

            Fedora 18 has a new installer which is not ready for non devs like me. Hopefully Fedora 19 will work better. I think Fedora can be an OK distro with KDE if you don't have to risk loosing the rest of a hard drive at install.

            Their new "Anaconda" installer is obviously going through some growing pains but so does a lot of stuff. I recently installed Arch-Linux on a partition and it had some issues (for me at least) which I attributed to Arch's recent switch to system d and or my own ineptitude.

            As much as I like to experiment with these other distros I still use Kubuntu mostly. Reliable, easy to install, easy to use, and mostly just works.

            Ken.
            Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)

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              #7
              Originally posted by lcorken View Post
              I tried to install Fedora 18 on a spare partition when it was released but the installer had me so confused I gave up.
              I tried one of the beta releases and also gave up. It seemed to be the most illogical piece of software that I've ever seen.

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                #8
                In attempting to simplify the installation process, it appears that Fedora has actually created one of the more complex and brittle schemes I've ever encountered. Read about the "storage workflow," especially, as part of the "hub and spoke model."

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                  #9
                  I installed the Gnome version of Fedora 18 and it went off without a hitch. Of course, I was aware of the partition/installer ambiguity since I read the release notes before actually installing it. As for the rest of the review, I'm not sure how Easylife for Fedora 17 not working on Fedora 18 is a problem and it isn't even part of Fedora!

                  Obviously, he's frustrated, but doing a review that turns into a rant makes him look worse than Fedora. Besides, at least under Gnome Fedora 18 is very fast and very stable. I haven't tried KDE on Fedora, mainly because I have never seen a reason to do so, but unless the Fedora developers somehow broke KDE, I would expect it to perform like its Gnome cousin.

                  When I used to mentor employees and they were upset, I would always advise them from holding off from sending a harsh email. The few moments of gratification it would gain, would not be worth the pain that would follow. I would encourage them to re-read the email the next morning and see if they still felt the wording should be as written. In hindsight, it seems that maybe the same should have occurred with this review.

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                    #10
                    Yeah, I'm tempted to give it a try myself, just to see if it really is as troublesome as this rant/review indicates. I read some more of this person's writings. He isn't uniformly critical of everything.

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                      #11
                      Read the release notes? Well, OK. Somewhere in the fine print of all that too many words stuff I found this:

                      Known installer issues
                      Guided partitioning cannot shrink storage volumes
                      The screen in the 'guided partitioning' workflow (see above) where you free up space for the Fedora install, if this is needed, was designed to offer the ability to shrink existing storage volumes, not only to delete them. However, this option had to be removed late in the Fedora 18 development process due to implementation problems.
                      The easiest for me was to open Kubuntu partitioner and delete the partition I wanted to install Fedora on leaving unused disk space. The installer was then able to format that space and install.

                      I now have Fedora 18 KDE running just fine on that extra partition. Trying to remember why I wanted to do all that.

                      Ken
                      Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by SteveRiley View Post
                        Yeah, I'm tempted to give it a try myself, just to see if it really is as troublesome as this rant/review indicates. I read some more of this person's writings. He isn't uniformly critical of everything.
                        I know a person like that, he cannot enjoy any movie tells me nothing but the faults, a person without an upside eh?
                        BTW I will read his review, I skimmed over it but I have it bookmarked for later.

                        Thanks, Steve.

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                          #13
                          I've tested Fedora 18 with KDE, and it really was not a bad experience, I would say the opposite. Fedora 18 with KDE works really well, it's true that there are to tweak a few things, but it works well. Yes, Fedora 18 with Gnome or XFCE really sucks. And the new installer is not very good. But, I think those details will be worked when I get Fedora 19.

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                            #14
                            Ouch!!! I tested the KDE version in virtualbox, but just let the installer do it's thing, so I didn't have to deal with any of that. Glad I didn't. I also tried easylife, and had the same bug with amarok/mp3. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed, and deleted it pretty quickly. I tried the Kaorora 18 KDE release via live usb, and it was a lot better as far as usability out of the box, but is supposed to have the same installer bugs.
                            Klaatu Barada Nikto

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