In the third part of our Penguin Shootout series, Timothy R. Butler considers the latest distribution from the best-known name in the sector – Red Hat. With its much hyped and attacked BlueCurve interface and various other
improvements, will 8 be the Shadowman’s ticket to victory in the OfB challenge?
Red Hat Falls Off a Curve
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Oddly enough, Red Hat mislabeled a Windows XP install as “DOS” — this is something other distributions don’t have trouble with (or at least, they get a closer guess) and, while this is a small detail, it is one that may very well puzzle a new user.
Looks like he doesn’t read very careful in the installtion, which my young brother was able to noticed and edit from “DOS” to “WinXP” during the installtion. But, I agree with him that it’s no excuse for RedHat to not add or fix this option.
That was a bad review (for Redhat). I disagreed with almost all of it, however. There was also a lot of focus on the ‘political’ issues of what was done to KDE, which in my view don’t belong in a review which is supposed to inform the reader whether the product is a yes or no to deploy. There was no talk about how the Gnome environment performed, just questioning by the author as to whether Gnome apps in KDE was appropriate.
Actually, Bluecurve is nice but everything else about Redhat 8 sucks. If I see one more article about how bad Linux is for newbies simply because Redhat 8 sucks, then I’m going to puke. For God’s sake, use SuSE or Mandrake if you are a newbie! Redhat is a professional and server oriented distribution NOT meant for newbies! Also, the Redhat install should label FAT32 and NTFS partitions as “Windows” not “DOS” since DOS used FAT16. Anything else would require more guesswork by the installer and possibly mounting the partition. Oh and I know you can run Win9x on a FAT16 – but technically both of those ARE DOS-with-a-window-manager operating systems
I will have to agree with you JPerrin. The article looks like a review, and it even has scoring marks as a review, but for the most part this is an editorial on political issues (a review is still a kind of editorial of course, but not this kind presented in the article).
>but technically both of those ARE DOS-with-a-window-manager operating systems
Win 3.x was that. Win95 was still relying on DOS, but it had already evolved to much more than a “window manager” as you called it. As for NT/2k/XP is ludicrus to call them window managers. The NT line of OSes are real OSes, not based on DOS, at all.
Finally a real review that actually isn’t afraid of angering the Lin-cultist crowd in it’s scoring of a bad implamentation of a OS known as RedHat. Face it if your jobs depends on running a good and stable OS you go to these guys right here ==> http://www.microsoft.com RedHat is one giant mess with all it’s security flaws and god awful fonts.
Another boring RH 8 review.
And for Pete’s sake, IT IS NOT A DESKTOP DISTRIBUTION!
Actually, I knew you could relabel the GRUB entries, but anyone who knows that won’t care if it says DOS or Windows. 🙂
Anonymous, I would ask you to leave this site, or stop posting your irrelevant crap, or I will keep banning your IP(s). Talk logically, or don’t talk at all.
maybe they should put it this way
“M$$$ product” – which covers DOS, Win9x, NT/win2k/xp
The first M is important, or user couldn’t differenciate M$ or the $$ charged for Redhat
Oh am sorry I didn’t know I was angering the Linux gods. I will bow before their power and respect your religon.
There was some talk about Gnome (or more specifically, the BlueCurve desktop). It looked nice. The CD’s didn’t mount right. The CD-Burner software required a password… etc.
As far as the editorial part goes, I felt it important to emphasize the apparent problems in Red Hat that are deeper than simple bugs. Many people are frustrated that Red Hat’s KDE, Qt, X server, etc., are partially incompatible at times with everyone elses. This is stupid, and I think Mosfet and Gordon expressed this very well.
Stuff like their complaints are issues that might be reasons why someone should not deploy Red Hat. When a company is looking at deploying an operating system over dozens of desktops, they should know if the company is known for breaking KDE. They should know that companies like theKompany are having a hard time making their software compatible with it. All of that is very important.
-Tim
[Finally a real review that actually isn’t afraid of angering the Lin-cultist crowd in it’s scoring of a bad..]
that’s because it is Red Hat, not linux in general
that’s because it is Red Hat, not linux in general
Exactly. We didn’t complain about GNU/Linux in general, just a particularly buggy implementation. I’d say the fall wasn’t particularly kind to GNU/Linux distros (MDK 9 was buggier than MDK 8.2, for example), but overall I’ve never published such a negative review on another distro before. Thus, it can hardly be said as an overall attack on GNU/Linux.
>This is stupid, and I think Mosfet and Gordon expressed this very well.
What Shawn Gordon said was correct and indeed a headache for developers.
But I would never listen to Mosfet, whatever he says. He is whining big baby, plus I can’t stand his Liquid theme.
Anyways, about the KDE issue on RH, I have already talked in the past. I won’t repeat myself here… (in short, I agree with ANY changes that ANY company do to ANY open source code; they are free to do so and the open source philosophy endorses more coding).
“As far as the editorial part goes, I felt it important to emphasize the apparent problems in Red Hat that are deeper than simple bugs. Many people are frustrated that Red Hat’s KDE, Qt, X server, etc., are partially incompatible at times with everyone elses. ”
Good point, and I’m sure that would be considered an issue for some people. But in my opinion, that should be more of a side note, possibly with a counter-point from the other side of the equation (those who ‘don’t’ think KDE is broken in RH). You wrote the review, though, not me.
>Oh am sorry I didn’t know I was angering the Linux gods
I am not a Linux God. Neither a Linux user in particular. I primarily use Windows XP PRO for my day to day needs. Then, I use BeOS or MacOSX. Then, FreeBSD. And *then* Linux. In that order.
But you should stop whining, because OSNews is about ALL OSes. When we re-published OSNews, we did it with exactly this goal. No other.
Uhh, I dunno who that guys is, but it’s not me. LOL I’m sure he’s having fun, but unless it comes from 166.x.x.x or tampabay.rr.com it’s a phony. I’m flattered though that someone would choose to pretend to be ME while trolling. 🙂
“I would never listen to Mosfet, whatever he says. He is whining big baby”
I concur.
I agree with any changes anyone makes to Free Software too. That’s their right… you may have noticed even Mosfet notes that. However, it is also everyone else’s right to complain when those changes mess things up big time. Indeed, that is what happens with Red Hat 8 (unfortunately).
There is also such a thing as being a team player. Red Hat would do well to work with the community rather than against it. If they had talked to KDE developers during the development process, these problems would have been avoided. Instead they get bad press like the stuff I just provided, since their attitude towards KDE caused various incompatiblities to arise.
-Tim
“I would never listen to Mosfet, whatever he says. He is whining big baby”
I concur.
Mosfet is known for his, uhm, temper. However, if what he says is true — and no one has been able to prove it isn’t, that I’ve seen — and he says it well, then why not listen to it? He published a good piece on why not to support Red Hat, and he has also commented on other RH annoyances such as its preference for communist China over Taiwan. Say what you will, I think that is perfectly reasonable. That’s not to say I always agree with Duley, he has at times attacked me, and I certainly don’t agree with that. 😉
As far as Liquid goes, I think its quite nice. I’m using Keramik these days, but Liquid is very good, and Mosfet’s contributions to KDE’s “look” (including the transparency code Keramik uses) are invaluable.
-Tim
This is something that people have been pushing RH to change since way back when (I remember this discussion during one of the 7.x betas). They claim that labelling it as Windows would have legal implications (Microsoft trademark or something, I can’t remember). You all know how legal shy RH is
“He published a good piece on why not to support Red Hat”
No, he has published a good opinion of it, and he has selectively responded without facts to SOME comments. I disputed him here in the forum, yet it went unanswered. It was undisputed because he has nothing but his mouth to back him.
“other RH annoyances such as its preference for communist China over Taiwan.”
They were correct, like it or not. They resolved it by removing all the flags and people still cried about that too. He’s a sniveling little brat, and his OPINION is useless as it’s not backed by any fact what so ever. I agree that Liquid is nice, but it’s not all that. I think Keramik would be perfect if it had a slight touch up. I wouldn’t call his work invaluable, anyone with the time and knowledge could have pulled it off.
For a .0 release, there could have been a lot more problems with Redhat 8.0. To make progress, sometimes you have to break things. Hopefully, there will be more cooperation between Redhat and KDE in the future. And in comparison with Mandrake, Suse and Windows 2000 I found that Redhat 8.0 really does “just work”. Never had any CD mounting problems or been bothered by the other issues the author is. As for Redhat dropping KDE, I would probably switch to Windows XP. I’d definitely prefer that to Gnome.
I’m glad that this is finally a review including informations about Red Hat’s compatibility to the projects which code they included in their distribution. I think every user should be concerned about compatibility of distributions. After all it isn’t nice if you used MacOS9 and have many programs and then switch to MacOSX just to find out that your programs don’t work anymore, same for different versions of Windows etc. With Red Hat policy forking existing projects by trying to be ahead of others by hacking in features no compatibility can be ensured anymore, even less so when project members are not even notified by the changes. Open source lives through cooperation, and in this regard Apple is doing way better than Red Hat. This is a big shame and should be embarassing for Red Hat considering that it is often enough called a leader in the open source business.
Quote from article
{
Red Hat still sticks to a standard text-based boot messages that look very peculiar to new users.
}
If it wasn’t still in text based mode I wouldn’t have been able to figure out why it would hang at,
Starting sendmail
Starting sm-client
for a few minutes each.
A newbie probably wouldn’t know how to fix this, but someone who has played around with WinNT services disabling and starting, can play around with the services app to disable sendmail.
Just a question did I do the right thing about disabling sendmail service, is it needed?
Timothy R. Butler is a wacko. Do you honestly think he would have given RedHat a decent chance at a objective review? If you know anything about him, you would know he is a KDE propaganda machine and extremely anti-RedHat. I really don’t see why he isn’t ashamed of himself. In short he is not a very honest person. You can find out more about him in the KDE mailing list and his website. I encourage you to do so. I have done it and I think he is a wacko.
“Political”. Can be applied on reviews on this. Really, much of the review does not really review the product but rather review Red Hat’s decissions in this case. The last I check, OfB is targeted in business-oriented Linux crowd (IT managers, sysadmins), when deploying the product, they do not ask the question “Does it screw KDE or not?”.
Besides, personally, the only advantage of Red Hat 8.0 is BlueCurve and the fonts, both of which I have on KDE 3.1 RC3 (didn’t upgrade to a more newer RC, waiting for the final one) on Mandrake 9.0. And I’m more happier here :-). One day, I probably would change distributions to Gentoo or maybe something else that appeals to me more.
As a Linux user for almost 6 years now, I can honestly say that Red Hat 8, warts and all, is by far the best all-around Linux distro that I’ve used.
And I’ve used a lot. (See http://www.moses.cx/os.php)
Anyway, as a user, I am very happy with the integration that RH has provided in 8.0. Yes, it has lots of problems still, but it is the first real, determined effort that I have seen to produce a Linux-based OS that competes head-to-head with WinXP and MacOS but doesn’t sacrifice the flexibility of Linux. You can complain about KDE in RH but at least they bundle it. Xandros, Lindows and to a lesser extent SuSE don’t even _try_ to integrate Gnome and KDE. The first two don’t even ship Gnome, and SuSE bundles a completely vanilla Gnome that they don’t even try to tweak the way they do KDE.
And it’s not even as if RH ignored KDE. What did they do? They customized it to fit their needs, they added intelligent integration between Gnome and KDE. Their KDE shares Nautilus’ Trash. VFolders work. This is a good thing! KDE and Gnome apps look the same. Fantastic! No one needs to know that K3B is a KDE app and that GToaster is a GTK app. Great! besides, RH’s bastardized KDE is not nearly as bad as Xandros’ bastardized KDE 2.x. in fact, the RH 8.1 betas include a more vanilla KDE 3.1. They no longer have to patch it for Xft support. They did for 8.0. So what?
Yes, RH made evoluion, OOo and Mozilla the default. Big deal! They should be. They are the more mature apps!
Finally, the “review” makes reference to both Shawn Gordon and Mosfet. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that Shawn is having problems supporting RH8 as a platform. I purchased KSG from them and I can rarely get it to compile or run on whatever OS I’m running at the time. (Debian, Gentoo and even SuSE 8.0) Frankly, I’m very disappointed in TheKompany as a company, and in my experience any problems they have with RH are just as likely to be self-inflicted. As for Mosfet. Well, let’s just not bother going there.
RH 8 is a serious attempt. I think of it as a diamond in the rough, and a gigantic step in the right direction. There are many things that I don’t like about it, but I keep using it even after having run the gamut on so many other OS options. Having had a glimpse of RH’s vision for the future of the Linux desktop, I’m anxiously awaiting 8.1.
Redhat 8 is designed to be in a corporate environment, with tweaking, it makes a good home desktop. The reason Gnome and KDE were made to look alike was so that if a user mistakenly goes into a different window manager, it looks and feels the same.
As for the author’s complaint about the mpg encoding, and xine, for the most part, these aren’t used on the corporate desktop typically. (Don’t say I’m wrong because XXX does, I’m just saying in general)
Redhat is trying to work its way into the corporate space where more IT departments are wanting to get rid of Microsoft after their strict licensing plan. Like someone said, just be glad they put KDE in, even if it is crippled, because as a gnome-centric company, they weren’t ever even required to include any form of KDE.
As for the complaint about two soundcards, how many people actually have 2 in their computer? I personally never have had a problem with automount. Just remember, that when you are installing linux, you get drivers installed also, as opposed to windows where you have to have your driver disk to even get sound, video, and modem to work typically. It’s amazing so many pieces of junk hardware actually work in a linux install.
Eugenia, you are taking things WAY too personally! You shouldnt let crackheads like these (or like me) get to you – we’re all just mumbling lunatics! Just mod us down and dont worry your pretty little head over it
AMEN!!!.. i have to SO agree with you.
the “review” went into political issues that had no relevance. Redhat 8 is the first distro that even my wife likes. Heck, the XFT implementation is the best font rendering i have seen on any Distro. RH made for the first time a distro that integrates things quite well and they chose the right apps for the right job. KOFFICE would be nice, if they would FINALLY support MS OFFICE file formats, but they dont. OO does… so choose the app that does the most. Mozilla as a browser is nice, and if you want konqueror, use it its there… (WHY???).
Now the “bad things about RH 8 are 2 that i could think of: mp3 support is not there and Mozilla is not XFT based. So, you go to freshrpms.net and get the mp3 suport (get apt and synaptic as well!!!) then you go to to http://ftp.mozilla.org and get the XFT mozilla version, install (rpm -i) the apt and synaptic, and then freshen (rpm -F) the mozilla. It takes 2 minutes to do that + the time to download the stuff. One thing about the review though: I use KDE as my WM in RH 8 and so far i have had no instability or problems.. so please tellme what libraries have been crippled or whatever…
ps: yes i am running mosfet’s liquid as well and still no problems. maybe my machine is blazingly fast that i dont notice much slowdown either but everything works. and it works well…
Seeing as how you can type any name in, and any address, you can impersonate someone pretty easily. I know that the IP address is used also, but not everyone looks at the IP, making it really easy for someone to spoof another. After seeing this done in this thread, maybe it is time that there are actual logons. A forum that I visit occasionally has a verified member status. By registering, you reserve the name for yourself, and only yourself, so when you post, people know for sure it is you. Perhaps something along those lines?
Yeah, I want my name back! LOL
“Anonymous, I would ask you to leave this site, or stop posting your irrelevant crap, or I will keep banning your IP(s). Talk logically, or don’t talk at all.”
Why can’t he post his pro-MS comments? Everyone else here seems to get to flame angrily. I might not agree with him, but he said nothing worse than most of the other thoughtless comments here.
ben: in fact, the RH 8.1 betas include a more vanilla KDE 3.1. They no longer have to patch it for Xft support. They did for 8.0.
IIRC, after 8.0 the QT people applied the Xft patch to their code.
I don’t care about Red Hat’s problems with KDE or any of that stuff. What I care about is the quality of the OS I’m using – all aspects of it. RH 8 shot above everything else and has raised the bar – and nobody has reached the bar yet. The grades or rating you gave RH 8 are a disgrace. You have totally mislead the readers of your review.
this isn’t a review, it’s political propeganda. Mr Butler is obviously scared that the kde that he loves so much qill now have to fight for it’s position as a popular linux desktop (because of the improvements made in gnome and distros that use it).
You know what? some of us prefer gnome, and make the choice to use gnome – personally i don’t like kde, so when i install Suse (after much effort/cost because they don’t produce free iso’s like redhat) i find it awful because they don’t integrate gnome with the rest of the os nicely.
However i’m not an immature little prick, so i don’t set up a “news” site specifically to spread bad rumours about Suse.
Oh, and i’ll buy a copy Redhat as soon as they release 8.1 – in fact if they take tims advice and remove kde completely i’ll buy two copies(i’ll send one to you for another review tim ;-).
Timothy R. Butler is a wacko. Do you honestly think he would have given RedHat a decent chance at a objective review? If you know anything about him, you would know he is a KDE propaganda machine and extremely anti-RedHat. I really don’t see why he isn’t ashamed of himself. In short he is not a very honest person. You can find out more about him in the KDE mailing list and his website. I encourage you to do so. I have done it and I think he is a wacko.
I’m hardly a KDE propaganda machine. Did I even say that Red Hat had to switch to KDE or something? No! I said that they either should support KDE just like everyone else does or just stick to what they do good: GNOME. As it stands, no one benefits.
Its wacko to suggest that I’m anything other than what I seem to be. Please produce all of this incriminating evidence.
-Tim