Fedora 18 Spherical Cow review - Bad bad bad

Brace yourselves: here's a long, highly negative review of Fedora 18 Spherical Cow 64-bit edition with KDE, covering live session, installation and usage, including Wireless, Samba sharing, easyLife, multimedia playback - Flash, MP3, webcam, applications choice, stability, suspend & resume, system resources, and tons of problems, like no auto-login in live session, no ability to launch the installation interactively, a highly dangerous and counter-intuitive installer, various warning and error messages for Wireless, audio, disk space and repository refresh, failed updates due to missing keys, no MP3 plugins, Amarok freezes, no ability to print to Samba shares, no desktop effects, and more. There you go. It's ok to hate me.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-18-kde.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

A spherical bovine eh ? What a lot of bollocks.
A big fun read from my point of view. Nice, thanks Mrk.

 

i quit fedora after 14 thought of checking back after great review of 17

but you shatters my dreams Mrk

good news is fedora by default supports Mate and Cinnamon by default

so if gnome 3x work on your system you can install Mate or Cinnamon and get out of little nightmare

one more thing they say fedora 18 support no root ?? whats that

 

more funny part

FedUp (FEDora UPgrader)

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013/01/16/upgrading-fedora-17-to-18-with-fedup-is-elegant-but/


since you have installed fedora can you test cinnamon stuff too also whats new firewall can you put some more light on it

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/11/28/install-cinnamon-on-fedora-18/

 

I tested the same version, Fedora 18 with KDE... I will note that

- Auto-login in the live session worked for me
- I did not get any sound errors
- The menu entry to run the installer worked

I can only assume I was "fortunate" enough not to get bitten by these bugs.

I must agree entirely re the new installer though - it is confusing and awful.

Also, Fedora 18 took over a minute to boot up on my laptop, not including the KDE login time. I don't make a huge deal of boot speed, but this is ridiculous, especially considering they use systemd. Come on guys, Slackware does better than this, and it uses an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kernel and no parallelism at all.

 

The installer.
I don't even think the issue is the smart phone UI (as you call it). Just seems to be very unfinished, bugs, consistency, common sense usability, things that would of been picked up by even the briefest of testing by users.

 

You've been /. (again)

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/01/22/010220/fedora-18-installer-counterintuitive-and-confusing

 

Yes, controversy!
Mrk

 

On that note, any way to read all the comments smartly
Mrk

 

Hmm. Now that I've been all masochistic and tested the Xfce version, I don't understand why they don't make it their official flagship version, instead of awful Gnome or sluggish KDE. Good performance and no crashes, who'da thunk?

 

Fedora without gnome is just like Ubuntu without unity and Mint without cinanmon. I don't get it why reviewing the gnome 3 f18 is out of question. A good number of people are still using gnome and they are not all idiots who have no knowledge of usability.

Coming to the review, Fedora never comes with flash and codecs. Its their principle of promoting only OSSs. You shouldn't have expected f18 to have flash and codecs in the first place. Also the easylife thing is quite problemtic. I have seen people complaining about it not doing its work properly. One would be better served by installing the codecs manually or by just installing VLC or others which have their own internal codecs. The missing key problem belonged to rpmforge, not the default fedora repository. The Anaconda installer being buggy and unintutive was obvious as it was completely rewritten from scratch and will only improve with time. Fedora 18 KDE being thirsty may well be due to KDE being thirsty. Can't say about other things, as I haven't tried out 18 having no need to change from a perfectly working 17. Will be upgrading to 19 though.

 

While I agree with everything being said here I have to say Fedora 18 is a huge Failure coming from Fedora 17. I love fedora and their OSS philosophy but until these bugs are fixed I am on Ubuntu 12.10.

The issues I have had are:
1) SeLinux freaking out on a clean install (because of Cinnamon)
2) Booting 3 times perfectly and then getting stuck in a recovery shell after that (not beinf able to find disk)
3) Cinamon being broken at first install (no desktop shortcuts or GUI fix for this)
4) Updating borked Yum several times
5) Install fail the first 3 times and I can't get it to install the bootloader to SDCard like 17 allowed you to.
6) X crashes randomly on my system while 17 was perfectly stable for months.

So until a fixed ISO is released I am on Ubuntu 12.10 for now. I hope they fix it soon as I prefer Fedora myself.

 

As someone who managed to successfully configure Gentoo to work correctly with SElinux and grsecurity, I feel there is little out there in terms of a linux installation that can shock me anymore...

 

I don't think the new installer is all that bad. It was different. The DVD installer also gives you some choices for desktop environment aside from the default GNOME such as KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE and Sugar.

 

Spent an hour last night playing with Fedora 18 XFCE spin. I didn't install anything extra. Not a huge amount to report feature wise as its the same old trusty XFCE and I had no issue stability issues or apps crashing.
I also spent a little less time with Fedora 18 Gnome 3.

The installer is different, but knowing what to expect from the above review it was not a problem Like early versions of Unity IMHO its generally OK concept, just needs refinement.

One thing they both have in common is, they seem so fast and snappy compared to Ubuntu with Unity (which I had on before I installed Fedora).

Anyhow, would be interested to see a Mrkovonic review of Fedora Gnome3/XFCE to see how it compares.

Cheers, Nick

 

I already have cinnamon/mate in pipe. I don't want to go gnome 3, though.
Could add xfce to the love treatment queue.
Mrk