[PlanetCCRMA] landing on the Fedora 18 planet

[Jan Depner]

On Wed, 2013-01-23 at 16:10 -0800, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 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.
> 

Hate to beat a dead horse but:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4MjI

I kinda figure that when Alan Cox says it sucks, it pretty much sucks.
Why do people think that clever is so much better than useful?  It's as
if the Fedora developers were all at a mixer somewhere and decided they
were right on the cutting edge of chic!  "If we get any cooler they'll
have us on the runway at the Victoria's Secret lingerie show!"  I've
been running Linux since the 0.99 kernel.  What distro?  None.  There
weren't any.  It was a giant PITA.  So, as Firesign Theatre used to say
"Forward into the past!"  Now we're right back where it's dangerous to
try to install.  Fedora, please buy a vowel.  You have seriously lost
the bubble (as they say in the silent service).