Guest post by The Beta release of Fedora 13 (codename “Goddard”) blasts off today, true to its namesake, scientist and liquid-fueled rocketry pioneer Robert Hutchings Goddard. The Fedora 13 Beta release gives an early peek at free and open source technologies that reach new heights of functionality and usability. The Beta milestone is when the Fedora Project encourages users, developers, and administrators of all types to download and try out the release early. While generally the Beta is reasonably stable, this is the time for users to exercise their favorite parts of the system and report any lingering bugs before the final release.
As much as I dislike Fedora, it’s one of the leading Linux distributions. No doubt.
They actually write new stuff and integrate bleeding edge features, besides just changing color themes.
I am mostly interested in system rollback with btrfs. At last safe system upgrades .. (Being spoiled with zfs/booting Environments of OpenSolaris that is
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Keep up the good work Fedora people!
Yeah, I didn’t like Fedora when it was created. I was upset they killed off Red Hat Linux. I’ve come around though, and RH does support the development of a number of critical parts of the typical linux distribution. Its the right combination of bleeding edge/stability for me.
I have always liked Red Hat Linux (was using it before it became fedora) and Suse (now OpenSuse). I like the directions they are going and i like the features and programs they contribute back into the linux eco system.
I have tried ubuntu but there wasn’t anything there that compelled me to switch off of either Fedora or OpenSuse. The Fedora 13 beta is pretty stable and is looking to be a very solid release. looking forward to it.
I am not a Fedora fan either, but I gave it a try since I wanted a desktop with KDE 4.4, also using Kubuntu and… both suck.
I would like to use openSUSE but I am very afraid of YaST. Sometimes I still have nightmares.
Meanwhile I am sticking with Ubuntu…
I’ll grant you kubuntu’s suckatude. What did you find unpleasant about fedra’s kde 4.4 desktop?
Anything specific, or just stability problems? ( if you were using the fedora kde testing repo, I completely understand, but its gotten better. )
It’s at Beta stage. Let’s not forget that lil’ detail.
Hmmm and KDE4something is also almost out of beta but still beta.
I would like to see Fedora’s gui team come up with a different style for KDE4.
Remember that everything is a plasmoid. We should see more interesting themes. But what we have is KDE3 look-a-like desktop. Back in the day, Enlightenment on my old K6-2 was a lot more interesting.
I don’t know what OP’s complaint regarding KDE 4.4 in Fedora 13 Beta is but as a general policy, Fedora prefers to stick with upstream defaults as much as possible.
I have outlined the reasons for it at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects
A lot of end users who look at “vanilla” GNOME or KDE think that Fedora doesn’t tweak anything. On the contrary, Fedora does a lot of changes at the desktop level (and otherwise) but pushes these changes upstream aggressively instead of hoarding them within the Fedora packages. This benefits the entire community instead of a single distribution
More or less the same problems that afflict Kubuntu, but I will mention the ones ,that I can remember, from Fedora:
-Inconsistent UI: Some kind of black stripe over the taskbar (might be kde’s fault), problems with Akonadi.
-Installation didnt go smooth
–Tried using unetbootin went miserably wrong until I did many searches and found the problem
–Didnt recognize other partitions. Messed up my MBR. On the process of restoring it I messed up also the Fedora partition. Thankfully I still remembered few commands from GRUB terminal.
–Updated kernel does not appear in the list of GRUB, manually edition is needed.
-Weird reboot freeze. Cant say much since I have not had much time to play with and to find out what the heck is causing but on the same machine I also use Ubuntu.
So maybe its the price I pay for using the “bleding edge of technology” as many like to point out but still I tried Fedora 12, gnome spin as well, and didnt have same things going on.
Never had any of those problems, but didn’t try unetbootin. Don’t really have any explanation why.
I’m ignoring the “inconsistent Gui” part. Too many people have their own idea of what is and is not inconsistent. For the most part, most of what people bitch about doesn’t really matter that much.
Do not use unetbootin. It has several unfixed major issues. Follow the process at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB
nightmares for YaST?
All those ‘it tocuhes my config’ stuff is generally overrated and the real problems even can be switched off.
YaST is a cool tool compared to fedora (although that’s a matter of taste)
Nobody will stop you from testing it in a virtual machine
like I do all the time.
Yes, rollbacks is a great feature, but remember btrfs is still very young. It will probably take a few more Fedora releases until it is stable enough for serious use. Till then ext4 and lvm snapshots will be our best option.
Is there an easy GUI for brtfs rollbacks, possibly integrated into nautilus?
It would be great to be able to choose folder by folder rollbacks or system wide rollbacks.
Fedora is looking very good and is tempting me to go back to the fold after many years. I left after RH9.
Unfortunately not yet, it’s really still a pretty alpha feature. I hope it’ll get prettified and made more accessible with future releases. For now it’s more a ‘hey, this is here to play with from the console if you read the docs’ thing.
Fedora was envisioned to be the testing ground for cutting edge Linux tech. It’s amazing that, while being at the cutting edge, we do have a very solid day-to-day desktop – with the usual high and low releases to keep things exiting
I’m doing some self study to get my Linux+ certification.
My current desktop is Ubuntu 9.10 but I’m using VirtualBox to setup my PC lab. The main lab PC is running Fedora … this distro has proven itself to be the learning playground for aspiring sys admins.
Well done to Fedora – keep up the awesomeness!!!
Fedora’s initial mission was clearly described as being a development platform for FOSS technology with a usability profile appropriate for capable enthusiasts. But since then Fedora has lost focus and watered down its mission statement. We’ve become too concerned with aunt-Tilly-usability and competing with Ubuntu for mindshare.
To my mind, Fedora has paid an unfortunate price for this mission dilution. To start, it no longer provides a refuge for FOSS purists and doesn’t highlight the current state of strictly unencumbered technologies. A lot of energy is wasted worrying about aunt Tilly instead of new FOSS tech. And yet, Fedora has not managed to come close to the usability successes of Ubuntu.
I wish Fedora would return to its original mission statement, drop the usability hand wringing and focus itself as a strict-FOSS distro for competent enthusiasts and developers. Let Ubuntu reign supreme for aunt Tilly, and those not comfortable with a FOSS development distro. We don’t have to compete for the same desktops.
Ain’t gnuSense good for you?
True enough. I’ll give you that.
I use Ubuntu as my main desktop – it has that laid back vibe going
But it sucks when you wanna do some learning. Ubuntu’s “feel” is more like : play movie, listen mp3, surf web. Chill.
With Fedora my attention span get’s more mileage – good for learning
Both sweet distro’s in their own way
… and I do share your concern.
Usability and focus on FOSS are not in conflict at all. Fedora from the start has always been working on many many usability enhancements. Where do you think stuff like NetworkManager comes from?
Fedora’s focus on FOSS has not diluted one bit.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
If you have a concern, be very specific about it. What exactly is bothering you?
AFAIK, the only reason that Fedora isn’t on the FSF-approved list is because of some non-Free firmware in the kernel. If you don’t have the hardware that uses it, you are running 100% Free software unless you go to the trouble of adding the non-Free section of RPMFusion or some other random repository. Keep up the great work on that front!
That said, where I agree with the grandparent post is that Fedora is trying a bit hard for Aunt Tilly now, or perhaps more likely Server-Room Steve. There was talk in the IRC channels and especially the mailing lists about slowing down, or even stopping the rate of updates in the released versions other than pure security fixes. Which means being out-of-date for most of the life of the distro, just like Ubuntu.
The only other major cutting-edge distros I know of are Gentoo and Arch, and the former is too much of a pain, while the latter leans a bit too much towards the simplistic, and has too small repositories (minus the AUR, which leads back to Gentoo’s problem…). So if Fedora slows down too much, then there will be no more major distros left that are truly cutting-edge, yet a pleasure to use.
Please keep up Fedora’s bleeding-edge focus, and don’t cater to the stability-seekers that could just as easily use one of the many stability-focused distros!
(Alternatively, Fedora could make a strong effort to make Rawhide usable on a day-to-day basis without slowing its rate of progress down, but I suspect that would be tougher than just maintaining the rate of updates on the two supported released versions.)
Correct. Other than firmware, Fedora is completely FSF-free and Fedora is very very keen on not compromising on the FOSS ideals. This goes beyond simple shipping free software but also large amounts of upstream focussed development and running free software exclusively on Fedora’s own infrastructure In fact, Fedora guidelines are the basis of FSF’s own guidelines for distributions and was born out of my discussions with RMS and FSF on this topic.
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
It should be noted that “bleeding edge” was never a mandate for Fedora. The current target audience is defined at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base
Yes, there are discussions around having a more strict policy for critical packages and limiting them in some ways. For more details, refer to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision
The implementation details are still being worked out
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/351
There is unlikely to be a strict “security fixes” only policy however for ALL packages. There are currently two different levels:
Critical path : Stuff that gets your system up and running and regressions in these are very problematic. Hence a more strict policy for them.
The Rest: A more loosely defined policy for them
This is going to be complimented with a lot of automated tests to catch common issues like broken dependencies or bad obsoletes in all the builds to ensure higher quality.
To meet the needs of users who prefer even more cutting edge updates, a system of add-on repositories is under discussion
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Copr
As you rightly pointed out, having a more stable Rawhide so as to speak is also useful. Some progress has been made on that already. One prominent and fairly recent change is
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/No_Frozen_Rawhide_Proposal
Essentially, Rawhide is now a permanent development branch (already moving towards Fedora 14 now) and Fedora 13 is it’s own branch, treated more like a general release at this point. This leaves room for parallel fast development as well as stabilization for the next release.
Having said all that, if you have concerns, please do provide feedback via
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Nothing is set in stone and feedback is always very welcome.
Hey Rahul. Fedora should not loose their nerve and give in to all the say… pulse audio hatters – and the noise can get deafening sometimes.
I’m very grateful for this distro – more so than any other in fact.
I guess I’m just over protective. Like tux68 and farfromhome I’m concerned that end users don’t know the true value of Fedora.
Thanks for your support and do keep the feedback coming. If we hear from more users with constructive criticisms on what can be improved, I am always grateful for that.
We are not cutting back on the amount of new development and changes we push through every release. Just take a look at Fedora 13 Beta and you can see ample proof of that. Nobody is going to be shying away from that.
What we are trying to do however is to avoid regressions in updates while trying to retain what makes Fedora, Fedora. It has always been a tough balance and I think we are doing much better than before with a lot more to do as always.
Clarity of thought sir. Respect \/
Note to self : everyone’s a captain. i am a drunken captain. the world needs level headed captains like Rahul.