Thu, 17 Jan 2013
Fedora 18
Fedora 18 has finally been released after being delayed several times. So far my experience is not so bad - upgraded systems mostly work. What are the biggest problems?
Most of them of course are in the rewritten Anaconda/FedUp combo. In my opinion, developers should be explicitly told to not rewrite things from scratch, if there is at least a small possibility of getting to the similar set of features with incremental modifications. The problem is that the previous codebase mostly works, and have lots of working features even for many corner cases. This resembles the infamous gdm-2.20 rewrite. Here is the list of problems I have ran into so far, using F18 on my laptop, on my workstation at work, and on a testing virtual machine:
- Gdm still cannot set the X server command line options, even though the developers promised the feature to be restored more than three years ago.
- FedUp provides no visual feedback about the progress of update. Who the f* wants to see the flashing Fedora logo during the upgrade, instead of some meaningful information? Are we trying to emulate MacOS or what?
- The new Anaconda cannot setup the storage the way user wants it to be set up, even though the old version worked even in this case. The developers response? Use Kickstart.
- Anaconda can select only one desktop environment for the installation. The response is the same as above. WTF?
- On my laptop, there was no way to select the correct time zone using mouse.
- Configuration files are being gradually
replaced with
systemdservices, which communicate over D-Bus, and have their configuration stored elsewhere. Replacing a three-line/etc/sysconfig/clockwith a permanently running daemon which needs its own command-line utility which talks to it over D-Bus seems really questionable for me. - My laptop is switching off when I close the lid. Apparently, another
systemdcomponent is doing this. Here is the workaround. - Jindřich's TeXlive page is yet to be updated for F18. There is the texlive-release.rpm package, but it points to a non-existent directory. I have yet to solve this.
- On the positive side,
systemctlno longer needs the.servicesuffix for the services.
To sum it up, we are slowly heading to the distribution where find(1) and grep(1) are no longer the sysadmin's friends, and
the sysadmin will need to use the specific D-Bus interfaces to talk to the
most parts of the system. It is kind of sad.