Its embarrasing I’d say to put out something THIS lame and have it be default for add-remove..of course we must realize that fedora IS bleeding edge and as a result they are off the hook for doing basically anything at all they want on release, because at the end of the day its just ok ;)

It should be rather clear by now whats up in this regard, so vote with your install, and choose something else and dont be ashamed to call a spade a spade, they just have to deal with it. They created the problem.

What a shame, as overall I found some of the nice touches refreshing, but you know lack of QA is just that, and so many distros these days have that quality in spades. Your just giving Windows an extended forecast of clear skies ahead ;)

As for packagekit, the version in Fedora does have its limitations, but I think it is possible to queue other applications to install. Just click install on them and they should be put at the back of the queue. Not ideal – especially because if you try to look into a different category or search terms that lookup will also be queued to after that package install – but it can be done within its limits.

What is slow is that you have to wait for ONE package to install before you can select another one to install. It’s not too painful if you install Fedora from the dvd, but if you installed from the livecd and need to install from ten to one hundred packages/apps, either you do it from the yum commandline (bypassing packagekit), or you are in for a hell because PackageKit can only install one package at at a time and doesn’t have the ability to put next packages on a stack, at worst.
Doing it with yum isn’t all beautiful, too. Yum groupinstall requires you to type long, verbose names to the letter or else it complains and of course you don’t have the autocompletion like you get with debian apt-get install metapackages, bash autocompletion for apt get is magic and with the thoughtful metapackages names makes everything painfree.

Now, compare directly to Debian + Synaptic. Launching Synaptic ? nearly instantaneous. Checkboxes ? Checkboxes. Check all the software you want to install. Then finally click the menu to tell you want to install what you checked, and go drink a coffee while it installs everything unattended (which is *impossible* with PackageKit GUI)

The it automatically removes X if you want to remove Y is long gone. Instead apt-get, aptitude and synaptic assume ‘suggests’ is a dependency it should prefer, but not cry about if you brake it.

Hence, aptitude remove network-manager network-manager-gnome .. does just that. It will _tell_ you, that it’s problematic and that the best solution is to just remove the packages and fuck the fact that ‘ubuntu-desktop’ package suggests it. If you want to restore the suggestions/recommondations of ubuntu, you can just re-issue an ‘aptitude install ubuntu-desktop’ and it will suggest to do just _that_.

How do I put this politely? Complaining about debian style package management from a usability viewpoint is not a way to pretend you actually know anything. Hate Debian all you want. Bash Ubuntu all you want.

But Ubuntu’s add/remove rocks. Debian and Ubuntu are rock-solid at updating. They solve and advise you at dependency issues and consistently give you several alternatives to keep your system in a sane (bootable) state.

And the quality of the package management and dependency resolvement pays off big time. There are more debian packages than there are linux distrobutions.

Off all things to bash Ubuntu about, this would be the most silly thing. There are things even Ubuntu can’t possible fuck up; and of them would be debian’s brilliant package system,

But as an brainfart organizer, its _brilliant_. Because its not about ‘sticky notes’. It’s about fragments of information. Things you want to remember, but not organize.

Say, you want to keep track of all the crap you remove, so you can have a all-in-one yum remove action you deploy on new machienes, Tomboy would be the place to store it. Say, you give it a title: ‘Fix Fedora’… Then in some other note, you keep track of your todo’s .. (logically called Todo).. you make an entry ‘Fix Fedora on my sisters Laptop’. The fix fedora part will be hyperlinked WikiStyle. WikiWords turn into links automatically, so you can also use this the other way around. Type a WikiWord .. click on it, and voila a new note with that title.

Tomboy: Automatic semantic organisation of BrainFarts ™

I also like that PackageKit differentiates between notifying me about critical system updates vs. minor bug fix updates. Nice touch IMO.

I have never notice PackageKit “polling” frequently either as you’ve stated.

I think NetworkManager has a place on fixed workstations. If for some reason the network cable becomes unplugged there’s absolutely no reason the user should have to go to the command and type “service network restart” to get things working again.

BTW I enjoy Tomboy Notes quite a lot. I don’t use all the features (like linking, etc) but I find it very useful for jotting things down.

Also, take into a count, Packagekit is still very new… the developers are working on making it work better (ie installing more than one package at the same time… and probably more… i havent read the ml lately)
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The problem with Fedora is that their package management is always “new”. It first started with the first revisions of yum included in Fedora that were so dogslow I could take a piss before it even installed a single package and they didn’t have any decent gui frontend for that. Then they optimized it and made it fast enough to be bearable, but far from as fast as the apt-get/dpkg combination, and created some lame GUI frontends. Those lame gui frontends were short lived and quickly replaced.. for PackageKit.
That same PackageKit that is unable to select multiple apps to install in a single row. I bet they WILL have to rewrite a lot of the code of that stupid GUI because this package selection limitation seems to be something too hardcoded.

Fedora never had a mature package management system. Debian had apt-get and synaptic for years, Fedora reinvents the wheel at every releases and delivers immature software.