I gave Fedora another go last night. No, not on the old laptop I used to develop Evolution on, but a desktop machine I rarely use (it has a dvd burner) – it has enough memory this time.
A few quirks. The installation was nice – a limited number of questions to begin with, then it went off and did the rest for me. This is how it should be – installing an operating system isn’t watching an interactive movie, why would I want to sit there watching a slide-show and answering more question as it goes along? I used the defaults but ‘installed everything’, without selecting individual packages. The default partitioning looked a bit weird – but whatever, if that’s what they reckon – at least it doesn’t have /spare (it’s an EDS thing). Although when it rebooted all I was presented with was a console control panel with no X. I configured that there, and quit – and it gave me a login prompt. Well no matter, log in as root, create a user account, then ‘init 5’ and we’re cooking with gas – oh it is nice to have the init system work ‘normally’ again.
Ahh a GNOME desktop. And no emacs. I thought I clicked on ‘software development’!? Just some weird ‘developer help’ application (and given it seems to use its own help format and doesn’t handle info or man pages – rather useless help at that) and glade got installed with that option. Well I guess gcc must be there anyway.
Tomboy notes. Hmm, what a weird choice to install and turn on by default – to be honest I’ve never used any sticky note application – it has few of the benefits of real sticky notes, none of the benefits of a physical notebook, and limitations a text file doesn’t have. Anyway, definitely not worth having a whole vm running just for that. The only reason it ever got there was political – notes apps have been around forever but nobody thought they were worth including by default until mono came along. The only other mono thing is f-spot, which always seemed like a potentially cool application (yes I even have the t-shirt!) – but then again i’ve never used it – in the early days I could never get it to run reliably and it was very slow and extremely memory intensive, and now i’d probably just use my ps3 to look at pictures (or more likely just let the bits rot in the rain of neutrinos from deep space).
Another ‘update manager’. Oh now, I can see problems coming already. It warns me I need to install a gazillion updates. I ignore it for now (although the gigantic attention demanding billboard over half my screen is a little hard to ignore). Lets see how to install packages. Hmm, Add and Remove Software. Well, I guess it’s familiar to those windows users out there. And then things start to look not so good. Very very slow. I click on ‘XFCE’ and it goes off searching … and searching … and waiting. I check top – hmm, a few processes sucking lots of cpu. Has it just crashed? Oh, no – here we go, it’s finished. No packages. Hmm, that doesn’t seem right. I try a few more and have no luck – all empty. So I go back to the update manager … start it up.
Oooh. Slow. Has it crashed again? It’s sucking cpu like there’s no tomorrow, and nothing appears to be happening – I give it the benefit of the doubt and go back to the TV. Hmm, after 15 minutes – no apparent progress. Ahh, by left-clicking rather then right-clicking on the updater icon I get a status window – such as it is. It just looks stuck – for some time, then it slowly lurches forward, and for the next 45 minutes or so inches it’s way to the end of the line. Oh well, maybe it was busy on the net (not sure why the cpu was so busy though), and who needs to run updates all the time anyway.
Back to ‘add and remove programs’ – by this time I’d searched and discovered this was a new thing called ‘PackageKit’. Ahaah. Anyway, wow. Slow. I mean, not just a bit slow – this is remarkably unusably slow in a really embarrassing way. When the list of packages finally arrive (I was still looking for xfce here), I get the option to click on it and wait for it to load the 1 line of package info as well. Or I can click on the tabs for the other bits of info, and wait even longer – although the more I click on the longer I wait since each is queued up and invoked sequentially. So there appears no ‘meta-package’ (in debian speak) to install xfce, well lets try and install the session and panel – maybe that’ll let me change desktops. Oh dear. Dear oh dear. Now it goes off installing one package at a time (with no real progress indication) and queues up every other job in the meantime. Then it reloads the whole list again in record breaking bullet-time, and lets me go through that unpleasant experience all over again. Hang on, doesn’t Fedora have yum? It isn’t perfect, and was never particularly fast, but it did a lot more a lot faster than this piece of junk.
yum rediscovered – quite a bit tastier than PK. I ran a gnome-terminal so I could run an xterm (oh the irony), and got to work.
yum remove mono
Gone! I get enough .NET at work. And other reasons I needn’t bore you with. Hmm, it seemed to spend an awful long time running gconf-tool during the de-install. I hope gconf isn’t becoming a dreaded global registry … something for another time perhaps.
yum remove PackageKit
Oh oh, it’s gone. I’m finally starting to enjoy Linux again. And the shitty update button is gone too – which seemed to go off and check for updates every minute or so for a good second or more of CPU TIME! I can’t see why updates need to be checked more than daily really – and certainly not such a heavy process.
I still wasn’t sure how to change my desktop – things in /etc/defaults seem to go changing all the time, and i’m sure there was a tool for it. Ahh switcher. yum install switcher. Hmm, not too much documentation. Actually, none. It doesn’t even tell you what options are available. switcher xfce … you need to yum groupinstall xfce. Ok easy enough. Took less than 5 minutes – I imagine it would have taken over an hour in PackageKit, with no guide as to which packages to install either. Done. Switched, done. Logout.
Ahaah! Now the desktop login option is back at least. Although it’s still set to GNOME. Ok, log in to XFCE now. What is that damn network monitor crapplet doing running on this fixed-network workstation? And how come there is no option to quit it like every other crapplet I don’t want?
yum remove whatever-it-was Gone. And at least it’s just gone by itself too – Ubuntu seems to want to de-install init every time you try to remove almost anything.
I did a ps | grep for python. Ahh more useless shit to fuck-off (it was getting late – I had had just about enough of it by now). Whatever they were – gone and gone. The printer thing will have to wait, since from memory it’s part of CUPS – but I’ll check when I have time again and care to.
Hang on, what else is wrong – why does the damn file manager have to open up the window when I put a cdrom in the drive? And steal your focus? How annoying is that – typing away USING the computer – you know – MULTITASKING and the computer absolutely damands your time to look at some CD you put in the drive. After a little hunting I found the options. Off, don’t play damn cd’s or movies automatically either. At least it’s a world of improvement over Winblows which wants you to confirm that you want to open it AS WELL (and get this – how to open it!), after searching for some auto-play application and copying the TAGA LIPA ARE! Virus to your internet explorer again.
Ok, it seems to be working ok now – although I wonder if I can get the ‘legacy’ nivdia drivers working for my ‘ancient’ card (OpenGL – Blender). Maybe I should look at putting this on my laptop too.
BUT Get rid of PackageKit – it’s an utter embarrassment – extremely limited features, terrible usability and SLOW and bloated (gee, red-carpet blew this shit away – 5 years ago, even with all of its earlier bugs and issues). An ‘update icon’ should be tiny and unobtrusive, use very little cpu and poll the server MUCH less often using a lighter protocol – and it’s just a desktop applet – worthless for a multi-user or headless machine anyway. Why install the network manager applet on a fixed workstation? How about a mobile profile? Why can’t it be removed in xfce? Fewer python crapplets overall would be a good idea. And mono ones – oh dear. Hint (for both python and mono): There’s a reason java applets never took off on the web.
Anger management sessions are ⇉ this way.
*yawn*
Rant over?
Erm, there’s been a notes applet bundled in Gnome since at least 1.2.0. It was gnotes back then, followed by sticknotes sometime in the 2.0.x and now tomboy.
taking the time to select what you wish to install would make you feel better with your recently installed OS.
Also pretty much all of what you criticise in fedora is present in almost any other distro out there… even PackageKit which is making its way to openSuse 11.0 and is already the default in Foresight linux…
The moral of the story is you can take a modern Linux distro and easily yum remove five years of progress.
Hi! Ive been following your quest towards the right distribution, from p.g.o …
not to start a good ol’ flamewar, but have you checked out either Gentoo, Sabayon or Arch?
Have only tried the 1st of them myself, but i think ill be looking on the other two now, seeing how the 1st is a source-based distribution, ie compile everything… Though, gentoo has a package manager, so its not like LFS … still, the posibillities of keepin your distribution quite slim yet having everything you want installed, is fairly good. (oh and no -dev packages, libraries and everything in the same “package”)
Sure, it is a pain in the scroutumn to setup, but once you’re up and running.. its sweet.
Sabayon, is a precompiled, ie binary version of gentoo, basicly.
just my five cent.
It never improved. Compiz a good desktop does not make.
PackageKit is awful – how could anyone think otherwise? What does it give? Is it just supposed to be easy by being so limited – it might be ok if it did a good job, but it doesn’t. It definitely isn’t progress (e.g. redcarpet). I don’t need mono – F-Spot i’m sure is just fine but I don’t need a photo application and .NET drives me crazy at work (nothing personal – I just hate it). I’m not sure what 5 years of progress it was I deleted.
smurfd, on the machine in question Fedora seems ok so far, like I said I may put it on my laptop which is what i normally use. I have some personal (and unimportant) reasons for not wanting any sort of SUSE (otherwise I would probably have stayed with it), and I used RedHat years ago so I’m more familiar with it. I just want something to use, not fight with all the time. A friend suggested gentoo, but the whole compiling thing I can’t be bothered with.
Juank – yeah that’s true, but with so many to go through, many of which whose names aren’t really reflective of what they do – you could spend a couple of hours of time sorting through everything, only to be told they break dependencies anyway. Easier just to install and fiddle afterward, at least you can see if it’s a problem then. Maybe I got used to ubuntu (live cd) where you have no choice till afterwards.
Ok, about PK. YES, GOD IT HURTS… very slow at the moment, single install process is a pain (I don’t know, for the many packages that you have in Fedora, going in and clicking install on each one seems like over kill). pkcon… ummm, I’ll leave that alone.
PK is not at the point of being ready, mind you…. piurt was MUCH worst.
But again, it something that is currently being worked with… so have a talk with Richard Hughes and company. I am sure that they will listen if you got ideas for improvement.
“Speed”
I believe that if a program isn’t all that great, like PackageKit for instance, the lack of speed Or responsiveness really exaggerates its shortcomings.
I often wonder what these developers are using that they don’t experience the same slowness. Maybe they are running supercomputers or something.
Forget Features and Bloat, make the system stable and fast!!!
oh never-mind, free software developers “code what they want”, and a lot of the time not what is needed. I’ve come to believe that “Desktop” Linux will never get past its bloated, unfinished, unpolished state because no-one wants to do this tedious work, and i can’t really blame them. This type of work needs a pay check at the end of it or why bother.
zucchi: you could always use the Fedora Desktop LiveCD it doesnt come with any mono package pre-installed and will make you feel a la ubuntu with no choices but what the liveCD has.
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)
I think I would recommend anger management sessions too. Especially after reading “Debian Madness”. LOL.
I happen to use Tomboy, and it is the only .Net app that I have found useful. f-spot has never worked well for me, I’ve tried to blame my ATI+fglrx combo, but still. Banshee too. Gave up on them eons ago.
I still wonder why nobody gives synaptic the applause it deserves. apt + synaptic are the things which make debian and debian-derivates so compelling for me.
@zucchi:
As the PackageKit maintainer I guess I should speak up a little here. The reason searching my groups took so long is that new metadata was being download from the server to get the latest package lists. I assume you are on a slow network connection if it took that long. If not, file a bug and we can find out what the problem is.
I would also appreciate not calling my work “shit”. I don’t think that’s professional, and any companies reading this blog wanting to hire you in the future won’t think it’s very clever either. PackageKit was coded mainly by myself in my free time in a few weeks before Fedora 9. It wasn’t going to be perfect, and certainly not enterprise ready in that short time. Maybe if you filed bugs, or helped write code then I could take you more seriously.
I think you’ll also find PK was designed with multi-user in mind, although from your rants it would appear you’ve done almost no research whatsoever. Please read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageKitFaq for fedora notes, and http://www.packagekit.org for further detail. We already have a multi-package install GUI, but this is the 0.2.x branch, not the 0.1.x code. We’re also working on proper category support. It’s very easy for you to rant like you did, but it’s just not called for.
@Fred:
I run a dual core Lenovo laptop with 6Mb internet connection. 99.9% of the time Pk is waiting for yum to do something (just look at the system profiling results during an update, packagekitd isn’t even on the list) – and most of the time yum is waiting for either a download of one sort or another or for rpm itself. We’re slowly fixing rpm to be faster, but your download speed is always going to be the big bottleneck. The fix is being smarter what we download, and we’re planning to do that soon, too.
Firstly, I wander how old the machine you were installing on was? Fedora (6) ran very swiftly on my laptop which is old by today’s standards. Why did you choose to install everything and then complain that you had to remove many things; that you profess you don’t dislike for any personal reason but allude to just that? That’s the expected outcome… to install everything.
I have yet to try out Fedora 9, I didn’t think that PackageKit had replaced whatever the name of the program launched with ‘Add/Remove Software’ was. PackageKit is still early in it’s development and without trying it, I was under the impression pre-release that it was not be the default but optional as NetworkManager was to begin with.
The presence of NetworkManager on a machine with a constant connection (e.g Lan) is the same one for Windows including a similar it in their taskbar. It helps to easily diagnose problems with the network connection and adds relatively little burden on resources, but makes the lives of laptop users (increasingly the majority) easier. If users had to enable this themselves, they would find it a lot harder. You can remove this from startup if you wish.
Spot on, mostly. Interesting how the first answers – even from Bastien, who should know better – are just the plain old non-responses and insults that try to avoid the issue by belittling your opinion. God it must really hurt those guys that you aer so right on the money and they have no actual response.
Especially Tomboy and F-spot irks me to no end. It’s not a killer app or even a commonly used app for a majority, NOT EVEN A MINORITY of users, but still it had to be included because the three very vocal guys never shut up about it on the lists. That’s not a process, that is abuse of process.
I do think that PK is a good idea though, maybe the problem is simply that it tries to use yum, which still, well, sucks. Big time. RPM style.
But well, you aren’t allowed to critize, really, and you sure as hell aren’t allowed to think bad descisions can be backed out.
You know you are right, though. And so does the insulters.
Interestingly, Tomboy was the only reason I gave in and installed Mono on my laptop a few years ago. For me it was a killer app, and it still is.
“#
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)
#
”
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.
suse has also been going through a slow package manager phase for the last 3 or 4 releases (it’s supposed to be all fixed (yet again) in 11). what is it with the package mgmt. devs!?
allright, whatever floats your boat. youknow :)
I think PackageKit is great. For me it is very fast and pleasant to use. Mabye you have a slow internet connection? And it’s a heck of a lot better then Pirut, the old “add/remove software” tool in Fedora.
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.
Tomboy is pretty cool. You should try to make less decision based on prejudices. If you hate mono, make a C version of Tomboy. (we’ll all love you for that).
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 ™
PS. What’s with the Ubuntu bashing?
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,
“I think PackageKit is great. For me it is very fast and pleasant to use. Mabye you have a slow internet connection?”
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)
@Anon – synaptic IS available for Fedora too. So is Yumex. Just not as default.
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.
PK–what a joke of software..I give a rats behind who you are and that you were insulted by this review of fedora..big hairy deal GET over yourself ,as your arrogance is very embarrasing for the community.
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 ;)