[PlanetCCRMA] landing on the Fedora 18 planet

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano
<nando at ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:

> Yes, the installer was puzzling to say the least. I managed to navigate
> it but I was like "what?" I installed from the gnome dvd and after that
> I added the MATE, XFce, Cinnamon and other more palatable desktops
> through yum groupinstall. I guess that would not work for a not very
> fast internet connection.
>
> I would give some time to the new installer. It is new and different and
> we all hate different at first (I think). It does not make any sense to
> me now, but what do I know?

I've been dual/multi-booting systems with Windows and various Linux
distros since 2000, and the F18 installer is the first time I *almost*
accidentally blew away a partition!. It's better now - you can see
what the partition names are, but it wasn't that way in the alpha
version. If a careful veteran like me almost nuked something, what's
going to happen to someone with less experience? Really, IMHO the new
F18 installer is suitable only for careful veterans or people who want
to blow away their existing OS. It's great on VMware or Virtual
Machine Manager. ;-)

> I don't have much hope, though. I gave time to gnome3, a lot of time,
> and it still feels LESS productive to use than other "older and obsolete
> paradigm" desktops. It does not seem to be getting any better or I'm too
> old to learn new tricks. Progress. I imagine many users (including, I
> hope, the developers) must be thrilled at their new found
> "productivity", maybe because that is not important to them. It would
> seem that what is important to them is, exclusively, the world of tablet
> computing where users just "consume" stuff and point at things. I use
> laptops and desktops and the paradigm does not fit (and if I had a
> tablet it would not be running Fedora).

I went from GNOME 2 to KDE 4 to GNOME 3 and I'm very happy with GNOME
3. The thing about Linux desktops is that they're pretty much *all*
customizable to something resembling your choice of a Windows or Mac
workflow. GNOME 3 has fallback mode, and pretty much all of them let
you put the panel at the top or the bottom. I've even managed to get a
usable desktop experience from OpenBox + fbpanel! The only problem I
have with most desktops is the amount of RAM they suck up with all the
gadgetry.

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How the Hell can the lion sleep with all those people singing "A weem
oh way!" at the top of their lungs?