Fedora has been around a long time, so I'm not sure why you think it added mind share. Ubuntu and Arch laser focused on certain audiences and Fedora really couldn't find a home between the two.
It's a proving ground for new features in Linux in general. systemd, unified /usr and /bin, ip vs. ifconfig were all things that Fedora was quick to apply, consequences be damned, in the name of staying cutting edge.
It's annoying as all hell sometimes but if you use Fedora you're already used to things that suddenly land in other distributions and cause strife.
Now if only they could switch to ufw from firewalld...
Indeed. I think the handling of Fedora (and/or maybe even CentOS?) will be the main indicator of where IBM is heading with the Red Hat acquisition. Personally, I hope their actions are quick if they do anything negative. I use Fedora and CentOS a good amount and would like to know sooner, rather than later, if I should move to a different distro.
Nope, this is about usage statistics. Fedora was huge years ago, but Ubuntu has taken the "easy" desktop user, Arch has taken the power user and there's a ton of competition in the server space, with CentOS being an effective drop-in replacement.
Fedora just doesn't really have a home anymore and hasn't done anything to really set itself aside from the competition.
Apart from being an integrated, polished distro that brings together all the latest development tools. And being the basis of RHEL, CentOS etc. And the distro used by tons of Linux developers. Yeah it's done nothing at all.
Fedora users are testers for RedHat, this does not mean that next RH release will be identical to Fedora from today, as an example the current RH uses a classical GNOME setup by default in a way telling us that GNOME UX innovations were not appreciated by RH for the workstations
I understand that, but what is the advantage of a Fedora user, your are testing bleeding edge stuff for RH, only if you are in for the bleeding edge and experimental features and you also are working with RH and CentOS servers.2
In case you haven't been paying attention Canonical came to the same conclusion as Red-Hat and decided to pivot into server and IoT space, as Linux desktop hardly brings any money into business.
No it isn't. Canonical didn't pivot, they entered the space. Brand awareness is what the underlying desktop market is for, while server provides income via support contracts. But Ubuntu desktop isn't going anywhere (on the contrary, Ubuntu subsystem for Windows shows Canonical wants to embed more into the desktop market).
At work, most of our Linux installations are Red Hat and CentOS, so for me, Fedora is the ideal distribution for a cutting-edge Linux which is mostly compatible with our software platform. Besides that, I quite like Fedora.
I see the same with Ubuntu. I've seen a lot of developer switch to Ubuntu based distributions because they've become comfortable with using it as their production environment, and it's nice to have the same underlying environment for development. I think moving into the server space was beneficial to Canonical on its own, but It's also brought a lot of developers to their desktop platform.
I hardly see Fedora in most places (Western and Eastern Europe is mainly Ubuntu), but Fedora seems to be quite strong in the US, relatively speaking. If it has a strong following there, it's probably sustainable.
I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users. Fedora's market share is just dwindling, because there's no where that it outperforms the competition.
I found Fedora easier to install than Ubuntu, and it has a more polished UI. I've also never had to wait 2 years for a library I care about to be updated in their repositories.
I got started with Ubuntu around 2008. I wish I could remember why I took the leap from Windows to Linux exactly, but I've forgotten what prompted me to try it. Ubuntu seemed to surge in popularity around that time. Now that I've tried both though, I have a hard time understanding why anyone who is familiar with both Fedora and Ubuntu would choose Ubuntu.
> I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users.
In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs, but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.
I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks, you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a "standard" for power users is a stretch.
Maybe power users wasn't the right term. It's the standard for perfectionists or the detail-obsessed? Interesting that you're seeing a resurgence of Fedora since I can't think of the last time I talked to a Fedora user. I suppose that's the nature of anecdata.
You are right now. ;) I went to Fedora (28 on my work laptop, Rawhide on my desktop) largely because it mostly resembles my RHEL/CentOS production environments--dnf rather than yum, but that's a performance improvement more than anything--and is roughly as supported as Debian/Ubuntu for third-party software.
In my totally-unscientific-and-anecdotally-based theory:
1) The US is where all the sexiest, high-end laptops are made.
2) The newest hardware often has flaky support at first, basically until the people who are using it (Red Hat engineers, etc.) submit patches to get hardware support into the kernel.
3) Getting those laptops working thus requires using a bleeding edge kernel, which is most easily achieved by using Fedora.
Again, just my personal experience. It happened to me twice (first with the original Chromebook Pixel and then with the Dell XPS 13 9343) where I used Fedora because only Fedora with the latest kernel properly supported the hardware. Now my XPS 13 is several generations old and well-supported by all the major distros, but I stuck with Fedora because I really enjoyed the distro.
I thought fedora was used by redhat to have many users testing features for free before shipping these features to redhat paying customers. Redhat works very well and hardware support is excellent. I use ubuntu at home, but for enterprise context, redhat is my first choice, by far.
Anyone remember when IBM was really keen on Linux around fifteen years ago? If they'd only followed through they would have had their own flavour and business to run into the ground.
IBM's strategy (until now) has been to encourage a competitive ecosystem of multiple Linux distros. That's why they propped up SLES, Yellow Dog, and Ubuntu at various times.
I don’t remember the detail but if that were sponsored then I suspect the revenue wouldn’t have covered a month of sending out free CDs, let alone doing any propping up.
Compatibility with Steam games was one of the big reasons I recently switched from Fedora to Ubuntu. Don't get me wrong, there's a great community behind Fedora's Steam support and I'm glad to hear it works for you, but I found a few things to be a bit more "fiddly" than they needed to be (the fact that I'm running on an Optimus laptop surely doesn't help).
Agreed on Gnome 3.30, I know desktop environments are controversial around these parts for some reason but I think it's fantastic.
I think it's interesting that they're now bragging about how non-spatial the file manager is. That's certainly not the way to "tempt me away" from the Mac.
After recently trying all of the top distros, fedora is light uears beyons the others, imo. I use the lxde spin and it runs amazingly well. I love it so much I use it on powerful hardware as well.
So, when my then-girlfriend and I moved in together a long time ago, she brought with her a bottle of vegan Worchestershire sauce. I tried it at one point, next to a bottle of Lea and Perrins, and I concluded that the only way you could possibly consider it a substitute for Worchestershire sauce was if you had completely forgotten what Worchestershire sauce tastes like, and were going off of some really hazy memories of it.*
I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there.
* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.
> I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm.
I don't think that this is at all fair. Some anecdata:
I can't compare GNOME with macOS, as I haven't used either, but when I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu/Unity, I honestly felt that Unity was far superior both in terms of usability and degree of "polish", to the extent that during the transition time, while still dual-booting, I futilely tried to make Windows more Unity-like.
Further counterexamples: Firefox vs IE, VLC vs Windows Media Player, etc.
(Yes, in most of these cases the FOSS version has/had a large organisation behind it, to some degree, but then so does GNOME, at least for the moment.)
I moved from Unity on 14.04 to MacOS, and it overall feels like a downgrade in the session management department; I miss tiny things like the “number of windows” indicator (MacOS: dot on launcher indicates process is running, regardless of number of windows; Unity: 1 dot means one window, 2 dots means 2 windows, 3 means three or more) or the “running, but windows in another workspace” indicator.
I still occasionally use Unity (once every couple of weeks) and I am not missing anything from MacOS
That's one of the most elaborate manifestations of ignorance I've came across on internet. Kudos for that!
Apparently you don't even know what you're comparing. In none of MacOS, Windows, Android or iOS is there a separate, standalone component that is a window manager. There is one huge OS, of which the desktop environment is a small part, and the window manager is a small, possibly unidentifiable part of that small part. Whereas a window manager is one part of a completely modular stack of software. It can definitely be perfected into something that works like those abovementioned systems (see elementary OS or Ubuntu, for example; and it's not like the "fit and finish" is there in Windows 10), but the thing is that the core userbase isn't in the market for that sort of perfection. I specifically use this stack of software (and there's way more to it than Linux itself) because I can decide what's perfect for me and still run loads of software on it wihout having to port them. Fit and finish is mine to do.
I totally understand that someone may not want to do that, there are distros for them (Android is one), and then there is Windows and MacOS, all are options. But you're criticising (some) distros for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. being highly, even completely customisable. Furthermore, I can easily say "they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there" about Windows or Macs, and what that basically means in all of the cases is that I'm criticising an unfamiliar paradigm with total disregard for or ignorance of the motives that cause it to be the way it is.
Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.
I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced "wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire (usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster" bit holds).
This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan versions.
Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) - Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.
Gnome is not like OSX. Not even remotely. It has created independent UI paradigms that I believe are far superior.
http://extensions.gnome.org/ - extensions to customize your desktop built in javascript and installable from your browser.
Tons of stuff like that. Try it you will like it.
> The company has also claimed that "Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal" encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local apothecaries to recreate it.
Think of Gnome as the chutney to OSX's Worcestershire sauce. Ultimately that's what the Brits were trying to replicate you know ;)
P.S. Referring to Bengal in particular, then what we are talking about is Kashundi
Not that I particularly agree with you, but that metaphor made my day.
I'm reminded of Stephenson in Cryptonomicon spending pages talking about a main character's past odyssey to deal with their wisdom teeth as an allegory for their current relationship status.
I switched from OSX to Ubuntu/Unity a few years ago, and recently switched to Fedora/Gnome. I found the transition from osx pretty efortless, and would say I prefer Gnome over Unity.
My instinct would be to completely agree with you - people can make a lot of excuses for Linux desktops because they want them to be 'as good', given all the other advantages of running Linux.
On the other hand, I left my job and the associated Windows environment in the summer to found a startup. I bought a T430 cheap off ebay as my main development machine. I put Fedora 28 on it, and have been using it for a few months. The entire experience has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of pain.
Fedora installed flawlessly and everything worked, down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight. The only command line tinkering I had to do at setup was to install tlp to help the battery life.
Gnome has also been really very good. It handles multiple monitors well, the task switching is good, I like the overall approach once I'd used it for a few days. It is genuinely a better DE than Windows, and I prefer it to MacOS.
My main niggle with Gnome is notifications - there is some magic algorithm based on your activity that decides when they should disappear, and when they do they are never to be seen again (no history or anything). This is my only issue with it on a day to day basis, and it's really not that bad (far less than I have to deal with on Windows or Mac).
That's not a good comparison because many Linux advocates still have to use Windows and/or MacOS so they do know how it feels.
For example, I used MacOS in my last job and Windows 10 in my current job and I still prefer to use Fedora Workstation. In addition to that, my experience with MacOS and Windows 10 showed me where Linux could improve (except software selection which is a hard problem to solve)
Nothing. It's still horrible. I'm glad you called it a desktop environment and not a window manager, because it's terrible at managing windows. And unlike older Gnome versions, it's hardly even configurable anymore.
You can pry my simple tiling window manager from my cold, dead hands.
I think if something like XFCE were to implement xmonad / dwm style tiling, that would be about perfect. I like some of the creature comforts of a desktop environment, but I prefer them to heavy on supporting features, and light on in-your-face features.
Also, I cannot stand the ubiquitous hamburger menus of Gnome. I really wish we could all go back to humane menus.
I completely agree. I used to be a heavy xmonad user, but I've had to be on macOS for work the past few years. I've found emacs to be a suitable substitute for a tiling window manager for the majority of my use cases and then have macOS for the creature comforts part. I've been test driving KDE Plasma recently at home, and it's quite nice these days. I wouldn't call it fast compared to other linux desktop environments, but it's pretty snappy compared to the KDE I tried five years ago. It was pretty simple to get it looking and feeling similar to my mac environment, and then emacs is always emacs. I do wish there was a more modern feeling TWM, but for now I like having something family/friends/coworkers can comfortably navigate when the need arises.
I used to hate Gnome a lot but switched to it when Ubuntu made the switch. The big problem is the default setup really sucks (for me.) However with the right number of Gnome Shell Extensions, you can really customize it to something more pleasing. These plugins are straightforward to add so it is mostly finding out what you like.
It's not the OS that attracts the users, it's the apps. I don't care what OS I use as long as it has enough quality tools but right now none of the two beats macOS for productivity as a web developer.
SourceTree with simple but featureful interface and I just can't like alternatives. It's not performant but I can live with it. It has Windows support though.
SequelPro. Man, is this good for handling databases. I used DataGrip for a while but got fed up with slow and cluttered interface. This is even the reason stopping me from using PostgreSQL as it only supports MySQL. I haven't tried but HeidiSQL seems decent for Windows.
ImageOptim. This is the kind of app I like on macOS. Simple, effective and even free. I don't mind paying but interestingly no good alternative for other OS that work on jpg/gif/png/svg exist.
Homebrew is pretty good to install newer small tools, like ripgrep, exa and the likes that hasn't made it into apt repos but you don't have to manually download and deploy them in /use/local and keep them up to date.
CodeKit, which I don't use often myself but for client side only development, this is very useful but once again, there's only Prepros that comes to my mind as an alternative which also supports Windows but isn't as good.
When it comes to image editing for someone who's not a designer like me, Pixelmator is simple, clean looking and powerful enough. There's also Sketch for vector tools which is becoming very popular. Maybe Paint.NET works too for Windows.
And with VMWare Fusion, you can test your site on Windows browsers easily but you can't test on macOS from other OS due to licensing.
For smaller utilities, Kaleidoscope can show diff of images and folder structures which I sometimes use. No idea about alternatives. Unclutter which can work as quick memo as well as clipboard history. I don't see anything that's as elegant as that.
And this is probably most important and not a development app but BetterTouchTool. The comfort of using trackpad with custom gestures just can't be beaten.
IDE (Jetbrains) works everywhere though.
I just like how most if not all of those have clean interface instead of a dozen menu to start with having 'advanced options' where you can configure more uninteresting options like in casual Windows apps. (Of course except for Jetbrains with hundreds of options but they're there for good reasons.)
I am at this very moment switching from Fedora 29 ( I was on the early Beta) to Ubuntu because of the acquisition by IBM. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Just made the last backup before plugging in the USB with Ubuntu 18.10.
I find these knee jerk reactions fascinating. What about IBM do you know that makes you feel this way? What about Red Hat made you happy to continue using Fedora? What about Canonical makes you consider Ubuntu to be better for your purposes?
This feels like the equivalent of switching from cow's milk to almond milk for ethical reasons. There's not an improvement, you're just making a different set of compromises.
Yeah, have no dog in the race, but was surprised by all the negativity toward IBM yesterday. I don't have nearly the bad feelings towards them that I do say MS or Oracle. Also they've supported Linux a lot, at least ten years ago, unsure if that continues.
Basically they exited from all the markets I cared about in recent years and became a non-entity, meh.
This. This is what is behind the so-called negativity. IBM has been an exemplary open source citizen; but it's very fragmented with conflicting internal fiefdoms which means no one can count on them continuing to be supportive.
People are reacting to the scale of the merger, the stakes involved for the community at large (GCC, etc) and what happens with most large mergers and they're very anxious.
People using Linux likely have jobs that have brought them in touch (or read) with a negative IBM experience. Off shore IT, out sourced development, large consult and build projects. Then are projecting that onto how redhat will become
Not to mention all of us that have had great experiences with Red Hat, and have a hard time seeing their culture surviving more than a few years under IBM. I'd be sad to see anyone acquire Red Hat because they seemed to be thriving and are a great blueprint for what open source can look like in the corporate world. I don't have any personal animosity for IBM, but I loved Red Hat and wanted to see them keep going without having to worry about the influence of a parent company.
To be honest, I was already considering the switch. Mainly because I have production servers on Ubuntu and having the same dev environment as the server makes sense. Regardless, if possible I still like to align myself with companies I feel passionate about, IBM is no such company.
I'm probably going to do the same thing. I have F29 beta on my laptop messing around with it, but I'm at a point I like what works, and Ubuntu works(TM). A lot less fiddling. Their GUnity desktop in 18.10 looks usable (though I like KDE 5.14).
I have no reason to like IBM. My vantage point from elsewhere in IT Ops is that they are as license-batty and money-grubbing as Oracle, coasting on the market share they've had for decades on the mainframe. This proves they've been beaten by commodity cloud, and they're buying it out.
Oracle destroyed Sun, Solaris, Java, and MySQL is only still relevant because it was such a popular open source project (vs. the other ones) that it had momentum. Even then, Postgres got a lot more attention, and MariaDB was spawned from MySQL's creators as a fork.
If I don't really have a dog in the running with Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat, why would I dig into it now, unless my job required it? Ubuntu is just as good.
I don't wish ill to Fedora, and recognize that a lot of good has come from RHAT/Fedora ecosystem. I personally just choose to stick with an ecosystem I know, particularly now that Fedora is in danger.
I'm surprised people put up with the Amazon integration. Like Windows has been forever (first third-party junk vendors would add, now telemetry and advertising), I feel like I have to spend 30m "cleaning up" a fresh install before I can start installing the stuff I want.
I'm skeptical about the IBM purchase, but like with a lot of big changes I'm just keeping my radar up before I jump ship.
I don't understand how anybody could make a comment like this.
Canonical has made some mistakes that the community has rightly called them out for, and sometimes they make decisions that we don't agree with, but in the end they open source everything important.
Compared to the old Red Hat they're far from perfect, but compared to IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Oracle or any other closed source software company they are fricking angels.
As I said, the old Red Hat was a much better corporate citizen than Canonical is. I hope the new Red Hat ends up doing a "reverse takeover" of IBM.
Kernel contributions are a really bad metric, they're like 1% of a distribution and get lots of attention. IBM isn't an Nvidia, but they're not a Red Hat or Canonical either.
I switched from Fedora 28 to Ubuntu because I could not make my IDE (IntelliJ, Netbeans, maybe Eclipse too) recognize the installed Fedora JDK (no valid JDK found). It seems that this has been a common problem for years.
It is a problem if the default JDK is useless and the solution requires research on the internet. I had even enough patience to search for more than 15 minutes AFAIR.
I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux for years and never had problems with the JDK.
You didn't install a JDK, though. You installed a JRE. (Ubuntu does this too, BTW - openjdk-N-jre versus openjdk-N-jdk.) If you Google "fedora jdk install" I get this page:
Which says pretty clearly: "The java-1.8.0-openjdk package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel package."
The standard package is to run software, not to compile software. Because most people who manage systems--hi--want to know what can be built on a system (and, more importantly, what can't be). You might not like that, and that's totally fine, but it's consistent and in my experience distros that have trouble with that (CentOS never, Ubuntu rarely, Arch rather often) quickly become ones I don't consider reliable.
Thanks. AFAIR I installed everything related to Java; maybe I made a mistake somewhere. I also tried to fix the problem with "alternatives --config java".
I think the issue here is the stupid name "OpenJDK" - everyone who has anything to do with Java development understands JDK to mean "Java Development Kit", and here those sneaky bastards give you a package named "jdk" but containing jre.
Would it hurt them to name the project "OpenJVM" instead?
When I wrote that post I was thinking exactly that.
Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages, but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more straightforward.
In Ubuntu it is called openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk.
With headless variants.
I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.
How so? `java` is the JRE. `javac` is the JDK. `mono` (I forget the .NET Core executable name) is the runtime, `mcs` is the development tool. Node or Ruby or Python all have similar splits, too. Yes, they're interpreters, but you generally need the `-dev`/`-devel` package to compile things against your runtime there, too. Their package managers are orthogonal to this (but a failed Ruby build, as an example, will often tell you you need development packages for a library).
It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism you're making here.
But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.
And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.
Someone replied this to me:
"This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."
I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.
I might be wrong but my mind associates -dev and -devel packages with something that is provided for developers of the package itself, e.g., kernel-devel allows you to compile the kernel. I'm not going to contribute to OpenJDK project so why would I need openjdk-devel package?
Good point, java-devel sounds like C++ headers and libraries and not like Java.
I do not contribute to the OpenJDK project or to the JVM either.
There are standard packages in the Java world: JRE (users) and JDK (java programmers).
The JDK is a standard set of tools and libraries related to using Java as program language. It is not a Linux distro or JDK distro specific set of libraries.
This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for.
Looking forward to F29 on my Talos II (currently a very satisfied F28 user except for the problems with the provided Firefox package which I must build from source currently), but I'll wait a bit for all the mirrors to catch up.
I really like it. It runs fairly cool and quiet, the hardware works great and the software support is now at the point it can be a daily driver. Plus, it builds Firefox at -j24 in a half hour (I have an 8-core SMT-4 system). If the sticker price on the big T2 makes you shiver, wait for the Blackbird, but Power ISA on the desktop is totally viable again as a workstation.
This release is particularly exciting because it’s the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base. This means you no longer need to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions. For example, you can choose Node.js version 8 or version 10, on either Fedora 28 or Fedora 29. Or you can choose between a version of Kubernetes which matches OpenShift Origin, and a module stream which follows the upstream.
I continue to be bewildered by the idea that this should be a foreign concept, that individual third-party software versions should not be tied directly to OS update releases. Literally no operating system works like this except Linux.
At least Fedora is more prompt about keeping up to day than other distros.
This is because packages relie on each other to work. They don't just bundle all their dependencies. So maintainers have to update package based on the dependancies version that are in the repositories.
Every package updating alone (or updating all its dependancies) might make everything break on the system.
So there is a compromise here to get smaller packages, that don't bundle everything but reuse other packages.
If you want packages that bundle everything, then you can use snap / flatpack, they are exactly designed for this.
The only reason this is even an issue is because Linux distros insist on clinging to dynamic linking absolutely everything, out of some outdated 90s-era assumptions about disk conservation, and package availability. Because often in those days downloading new packages wasn't an option because you might not even have internet at home, distros just bundled every known bit of software they could think of on the CD (Remember Walnut Creek?).
But it's 2018. Even cell phone 3G is fast enough to deal with Linux deps. Disks are huge outside embedded spaces where the last thing you want to do is install a zillion random Linux deps anyway. Literally every programming language on the planet has tools to manage dependencies per-project, and it's best practice to lock a known good version of any libraries for a program anyway.
Which means the only remaining concern is system-level compatibility issues, which shouldn't be a problem for normal userland software anyway, and if anything should allow for and expect failure. It's not something you should be tying the entire OS release and update cycle to for your entire software ecosystem.
And yet, despite years of Linus screaming "DON'T BREAK USERLAND", distros still are built, and almost have to be built, on the assumption that everything is an interdependent house of cards that could break at any time. And the disk space arguments that consumed Usenet for years on end have become meaningless anyway, because software winds up having to link to specific versions of libs anyway, so most distros have to maintain a bunch of separate version packages anyway.
Like I said: no other OS has this problem to this degree. OS X, Windows, hell even FreeBSD keeps pkg/ports distinct from the core system. I have never on any of these had to wait six months or side load just to get an up-to-date version of my tools. And we all know this: why do you think every damn language has its own package manager now? Why everyone has to maintain a ~/.local/bin, and indeed: why snap/flatpack ever had to exist in the first place.
tl;dr: I know damn well why it is this way, but it's dumb, and while I'm glad someone's finally fixing it, that doesn't make it any less baffling it took this many years to do so.
I'm not sure if it would address his needs, but NixOS takes a different approach. The package manager, Nix, can run in a Linux environment or even macOS. GNU Guix is another variant of it.
I've played around with it and really liked it, but it's mostly been false starts when trying to do anything serious. I understand why there's a DSL, but I had trouble groking it enough to build my own stuff.
I know nothing about this Fedora tech (but am really curious). Windows and macOS don't mix libraries and Applications with a packaging system and Linux distros do. I've always felt like the packaging systems for each OS had very different goals and most all of the Linux distro's packaging systems had way too much overlap to warrant different tech. When you're talking about packaging systems for macOS and Windows are you talking about things like Homebrew/Chocolatey or their interface for installing applications? I just don't see other OSes handling these things any better.
I've been in the camp that language-specific package managers shouldn't have to be a thing. I'm on your side in that I think it's ridiculous that package managers have belligerent towards language-specific package managers (they'll package up libraries for languages, but not change their packaging system to address the needs they were trying to fill).
Like you, I maintain my own ~/.local/bin and it sucks because the next thing I want to do is message the guy next to me and say, "run this." Instead, I have to explain how to build or install everything I just did and troubleshoot any problems. But I don't see any benefits for Windows or macOS for doing this.
At larger vfx and animation studios, they all have their own packaging system they've written to manage a project's tools (here's one that's been Open Sourced[1]). I've also wanted alternative approaches, like Nix, to gain popularity.
Former sysadmin here: conserving disk space was never a major concern. The issue is with security updates. There was one nightmare period where every single program in existence seemed to have a bundled copy of zlib, each with a slightly different version of the same gaping security vulnerability. Things like disk (and network and RAM) savings are really the icing on that cake.
It was also the case that each bit of free / open source software had its own ideas of a good user experience. The distro building all all the software allowed the application of consistent policies. As a user, this was a huge step forward.
But that said, yes, things have changed and distros need to too.
I'm staying on 16.04 because I prefer Unity over any other DE. No problems so far, but after it becomes too much of a burden I'll have to switch to Mint with Cinnamon.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadIt's annoying as all hell sometimes but if you use Fedora you're already used to things that suddenly land in other distributions and cause strife.
Now if only they could switch to ufw from firewalld...
How so? Is there some official statement from Fedora? That's surprising.
Fedora just doesn't really have a home anymore and hasn't done anything to really set itself aside from the competition.
Fedora users are testers for RedHat, this does not mean that next RH release will be identical to Fedora from today, as an example the current RH uses a classical GNOME setup by default in a way telling us that GNOME UX innovations were not appreciated by RH for the workstations
Somehow I dont see the emoji picker making it into rhel 8 though!
So the "easy" desktop user is on its way out.
I got started with Ubuntu around 2008. I wish I could remember why I took the leap from Windows to Linux exactly, but I've forgotten what prompted me to try it. Ubuntu seemed to surge in popularity around that time. Now that I've tried both though, I have a hard time understanding why anyone who is familiar with both Fedora and Ubuntu would choose Ubuntu.
Since Fedora 28, I agree. Prior to that, I very much preferred the Ubuntu installer to the Fedora one.
In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs, but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.
I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks, you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a "standard" for power users is a stretch.
1) The US is where all the sexiest, high-end laptops are made.
2) The newest hardware often has flaky support at first, basically until the people who are using it (Red Hat engineers, etc.) submit patches to get hardware support into the kernel.
3) Getting those laptops working thus requires using a bleeding edge kernel, which is most easily achieved by using Fedora.
Again, just my personal experience. It happened to me twice (first with the original Chromebook Pixel and then with the Dell XPS 13 9343) where I used Fedora because only Fedora with the latest kernel properly supported the hardware. Now my XPS 13 is several generations old and well-supported by all the major distros, but I stuck with Fedora because I really enjoyed the distro.
There’s a difference between what you want to happen and what you think will happen...
Oh and if that isnt good enough - check out https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount to play windows-only Steam games on Linux
Agreed on Gnome 3.30, I know desktop environments are controversial around these parts for some reason but I think it's fantastic.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MxN0J9ZxVI [1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg249136.html
You are right, that is very cool. It seems like they're definitely kicking it up a notch. I like the notes and podcast apps.
All around just a superb distro.
I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there.
* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.
I haven't been using macOS for any serious work yet, but so far it feels a lot clunkier and messier. It's like an idiot butler.
I'm making an effort to use it with the default settings, as it was designed, rather than trying to bend it towards my workflow.
I'll see how it goes, but so far macOS is nowhere near competitive with Fedora in terms of polish.
I don't think that this is at all fair. Some anecdata:
I can't compare GNOME with macOS, as I haven't used either, but when I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu/Unity, I honestly felt that Unity was far superior both in terms of usability and degree of "polish", to the extent that during the transition time, while still dual-booting, I futilely tried to make Windows more Unity-like.
Further counterexamples: Firefox vs IE, VLC vs Windows Media Player, etc.
(Yes, in most of these cases the FOSS version has/had a large organisation behind it, to some degree, but then so does GNOME, at least for the moment.)
I still occasionally use Unity (once every couple of weeks) and I am not missing anything from MacOS
Apparently you don't even know what you're comparing. In none of MacOS, Windows, Android or iOS is there a separate, standalone component that is a window manager. There is one huge OS, of which the desktop environment is a small part, and the window manager is a small, possibly unidentifiable part of that small part. Whereas a window manager is one part of a completely modular stack of software. It can definitely be perfected into something that works like those abovementioned systems (see elementary OS or Ubuntu, for example; and it's not like the "fit and finish" is there in Windows 10), but the thing is that the core userbase isn't in the market for that sort of perfection. I specifically use this stack of software (and there's way more to it than Linux itself) because I can decide what's perfect for me and still run loads of software on it wihout having to port them. Fit and finish is mine to do.
I totally understand that someone may not want to do that, there are distros for them (Android is one), and then there is Windows and MacOS, all are options. But you're criticising (some) distros for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. being highly, even completely customisable. Furthermore, I can easily say "they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there" about Windows or Macs, and what that basically means in all of the cases is that I'm criticising an unfamiliar paradigm with total disregard for or ignorance of the motives that cause it to be the way it is.
Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.
I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced "wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire (usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster" bit holds).
This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan versions.
Hope that helps.
Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) - Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.
http://extensions.gnome.org/ - extensions to customize your desktop built in javascript and installable from your browser.
Tons of stuff like that. Try it you will like it.
> The company has also claimed that "Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal" encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local apothecaries to recreate it.
Think of Gnome as the chutney to OSX's Worcestershire sauce. Ultimately that's what the Brits were trying to replicate you know ;)
P.S. Referring to Bengal in particular, then what we are talking about is Kashundi
I'm reminded of Stephenson in Cryptonomicon spending pages talking about a main character's past odyssey to deal with their wisdom teeth as an allegory for their current relationship status.
On the other hand, I left my job and the associated Windows environment in the summer to found a startup. I bought a T430 cheap off ebay as my main development machine. I put Fedora 28 on it, and have been using it for a few months. The entire experience has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of pain.
Fedora installed flawlessly and everything worked, down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight. The only command line tinkering I had to do at setup was to install tlp to help the battery life.
Gnome has also been really very good. It handles multiple monitors well, the task switching is good, I like the overall approach once I'd used it for a few days. It is genuinely a better DE than Windows, and I prefer it to MacOS.
My main niggle with Gnome is notifications - there is some magic algorithm based on your activity that decides when they should disappear, and when they do they are never to be seen again (no history or anything). This is my only issue with it on a day to day basis, and it's really not that bad (far less than I have to deal with on Windows or Mac).
For example, I used MacOS in my last job and Windows 10 in my current job and I still prefer to use Fedora Workstation. In addition to that, my experience with MacOS and Windows 10 showed me where Linux could improve (except software selection which is a hard problem to solve)
You can pry my simple tiling window manager from my cold, dead hands.
Also, I cannot stand the ubiquitous hamburger menus of Gnome. I really wish we could all go back to humane menus.
The title bars and other UI elements are quite large though, probably for usability reasons. Traditional tiling wm's waste less screen estate.
What do you use that isn't a first class citizen on the others? What does macOS have for web development that you can't find anywhere else?
I am really struggling to work out what applications macOS has for web that would make it anything more than an equal.
SequelPro. Man, is this good for handling databases. I used DataGrip for a while but got fed up with slow and cluttered interface. This is even the reason stopping me from using PostgreSQL as it only supports MySQL. I haven't tried but HeidiSQL seems decent for Windows.
ImageOptim. This is the kind of app I like on macOS. Simple, effective and even free. I don't mind paying but interestingly no good alternative for other OS that work on jpg/gif/png/svg exist.
Homebrew is pretty good to install newer small tools, like ripgrep, exa and the likes that hasn't made it into apt repos but you don't have to manually download and deploy them in /use/local and keep them up to date.
CodeKit, which I don't use often myself but for client side only development, this is very useful but once again, there's only Prepros that comes to my mind as an alternative which also supports Windows but isn't as good.
When it comes to image editing for someone who's not a designer like me, Pixelmator is simple, clean looking and powerful enough. There's also Sketch for vector tools which is becoming very popular. Maybe Paint.NET works too for Windows.
And with VMWare Fusion, you can test your site on Windows browsers easily but you can't test on macOS from other OS due to licensing.
For smaller utilities, Kaleidoscope can show diff of images and folder structures which I sometimes use. No idea about alternatives. Unclutter which can work as quick memo as well as clipboard history. I don't see anything that's as elegant as that.
And this is probably most important and not a development app but BetterTouchTool. The comfort of using trackpad with custom gestures just can't be beaten.
IDE (Jetbrains) works everywhere though.
I just like how most if not all of those have clean interface instead of a dozen menu to start with having 'advanced options' where you can configure more uninteresting options like in casual Windows apps. (Of course except for Jetbrains with hundreds of options but they're there for good reasons.)
I see no reason to leave macOS for a while.
https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fedora/linux/releases/29/Workstat...
This feels like the equivalent of switching from cow's milk to almond milk for ethical reasons. There's not an improvement, you're just making a different set of compromises.
Basically they exited from all the markets I cared about in recent years and became a non-entity, meh.
This. This is what is behind the so-called negativity. IBM has been an exemplary open source citizen; but it's very fragmented with conflicting internal fiefdoms which means no one can count on them continuing to be supportive.
People are reacting to the scale of the merger, the stakes involved for the community at large (GCC, etc) and what happens with most large mergers and they're very anxious.
And not without very good reason...
I have no reason to like IBM. My vantage point from elsewhere in IT Ops is that they are as license-batty and money-grubbing as Oracle, coasting on the market share they've had for decades on the mainframe. This proves they've been beaten by commodity cloud, and they're buying it out.
Oracle destroyed Sun, Solaris, Java, and MySQL is only still relevant because it was such a popular open source project (vs. the other ones) that it had momentum. Even then, Postgres got a lot more attention, and MariaDB was spawned from MySQL's creators as a fork.
If I don't really have a dog in the running with Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat, why would I dig into it now, unless my job required it? Ubuntu is just as good.
I don't wish ill to Fedora, and recognize that a lot of good has come from RHAT/Fedora ecosystem. I personally just choose to stick with an ecosystem I know, particularly now that Fedora is in danger.
The hardware support out of the box was much better, that packages were more up to date and the whole system was more stable.
You should look at manjero.
I'm skeptical about the IBM purchase, but like with a lot of big changes I'm just keeping my radar up before I jump ship.
Canonical has made some mistakes that the community has rightly called them out for, and sometimes they make decisions that we don't agree with, but in the end they open source everything important.
Compared to the old Red Hat they're far from perfect, but compared to IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Oracle or any other closed source software company they are fricking angels.
That's not entirely fair. Canonical has almost zero kernel contributions, while IBM is the #4 top corporate contributor.
And Canonical keeps some "important" things proprietary, like the server code behind Snaps.
Kernel contributions are a really bad metric, they're like 1% of a distribution and get lots of attention. IBM isn't an Nvidia, but they're not a Red Hat or Canonical either.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release-note...
Unfortunately they are half-empty!
I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux for years and never had problems with the JDK.
https://openjdk.java.net/install/
Which says pretty clearly: "The java-1.8.0-openjdk package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel package."
The standard package is to run software, not to compile software. Because most people who manage systems--hi--want to know what can be built on a system (and, more importantly, what can't be). You might not like that, and that's totally fine, but it's consistent and in my experience distros that have trouble with that (CentOS never, Ubuntu rarely, Arch rather often) quickly become ones I don't consider reliable.
Would it hurt them to name the project "OpenJVM" instead?
Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages, but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more straightforward.
I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.
It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism you're making here.
But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.
And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.
Someone replied this to me: "This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."
I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.
I do not contribute to the OpenJDK project or to the JVM either.
There are standard packages in the Java world: JRE (users) and JDK (java programmers).
The JDK is a standard set of tools and libraries related to using Java as program language. It is not a Linux distro or JDK distro specific set of libraries.
I continue to be bewildered by the idea that this should be a foreign concept, that individual third-party software versions should not be tied directly to OS update releases. Literally no operating system works like this except Linux.
At least Fedora is more prompt about keeping up to day than other distros.
Every package updating alone (or updating all its dependancies) might make everything break on the system.
So there is a compromise here to get smaller packages, that don't bundle everything but reuse other packages.
If you want packages that bundle everything, then you can use snap / flatpack, they are exactly designed for this.
But it's 2018. Even cell phone 3G is fast enough to deal with Linux deps. Disks are huge outside embedded spaces where the last thing you want to do is install a zillion random Linux deps anyway. Literally every programming language on the planet has tools to manage dependencies per-project, and it's best practice to lock a known good version of any libraries for a program anyway.
Which means the only remaining concern is system-level compatibility issues, which shouldn't be a problem for normal userland software anyway, and if anything should allow for and expect failure. It's not something you should be tying the entire OS release and update cycle to for your entire software ecosystem.
And yet, despite years of Linus screaming "DON'T BREAK USERLAND", distros still are built, and almost have to be built, on the assumption that everything is an interdependent house of cards that could break at any time. And the disk space arguments that consumed Usenet for years on end have become meaningless anyway, because software winds up having to link to specific versions of libs anyway, so most distros have to maintain a bunch of separate version packages anyway.
Like I said: no other OS has this problem to this degree. OS X, Windows, hell even FreeBSD keeps pkg/ports distinct from the core system. I have never on any of these had to wait six months or side load just to get an up-to-date version of my tools. And we all know this: why do you think every damn language has its own package manager now? Why everyone has to maintain a ~/.local/bin, and indeed: why snap/flatpack ever had to exist in the first place.
tl;dr: I know damn well why it is this way, but it's dumb, and while I'm glad someone's finally fixing it, that doesn't make it any less baffling it took this many years to do so.
Do you know any Linux distros that try to solve this issue, outside fedora here?
I've played around with it and really liked it, but it's mostly been false starts when trying to do anything serious. I understand why there's a DSL, but I had trouble groking it enough to build my own stuff.
I've been in the camp that language-specific package managers shouldn't have to be a thing. I'm on your side in that I think it's ridiculous that package managers have belligerent towards language-specific package managers (they'll package up libraries for languages, but not change their packaging system to address the needs they were trying to fill).
Like you, I maintain my own ~/.local/bin and it sucks because the next thing I want to do is message the guy next to me and say, "run this." Instead, I have to explain how to build or install everything I just did and troubleshoot any problems. But I don't see any benefits for Windows or macOS for doing this.
At larger vfx and animation studios, they all have their own packaging system they've written to manage a project's tools (here's one that's been Open Sourced[1]). I've also wanted alternative approaches, like Nix, to gain popularity.
[1] https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez
- always want the latest and greatest and can't wait for an update
- use a workstation.
It is arguable that you are a minority of the use cases though. For servers, small disk footprint is a huge plus.
Also, most computer users are not living on the edge and chasing updates. And let's not forget the speed of patching...
It was also the case that each bit of free / open source software had its own ideas of a good user experience. The distro building all all the software allowed the application of consistent policies. As a user, this was a huge step forward.
But that said, yes, things have changed and distros need to too.
- Keyboard will stop working sometimes after waking up from sleep
- Shut down randomly turns into a restart
We've waited years for the 1998 Linux font tendering to have caught up with, at least, Win 2000.
There was dozens of X Font Server patches that never worked.
Then illegal downloads of MS TeueType fonts that were a little better*, but still infuriating.
Then fontconfig examples from hundreds of blogs and forums.
Then forks of forks of some dude's Arch Infinality tweaks that kind of worked, but not really.
Then Google released a bunch of professional Android and Web fonts which got us closer...
Then a bunch of patents expired - finally we'd be on par with Win XP or OSX Tiger.... In 2016.
Last I heard, a bunch of Microsoft 's Open Initiative patents would allow Win 7 level rendering (though MacOS and Win10 have gotten even better).
I gave up a whole ago and just bought a Mac.