I have been using RedHat since v9 and have stuck with that distro until today. I have upgraded from one version to another for a long time and it is only recently that I reinstalled from scratch. I have found the partionning tool inside the installer shockingly bad. I had a very hard time creating my partitions with the size I wanted and having them keep the order I wanted them to have. After a few attempts, I landed in the console and went the old way: fdisk.
I tried parted too, but it seems awfully complicated compared to fdisk. When creating a new partition, fdisk offers something very nice & logical: it can create the new partition where the previous one ends with no fuss. With parted, I need to input start + end positions? I need more than 5 minutes to partition a drive? What the fsck?
There seems to be a very bad habit of duplicating tools instead of building/merging with existing ones. This is sooo questionnable. fdisk/parted is one example. Another is yum/apt-get. I haven't used yum enough to know all the differences with apt. I know there are technical reasons for going with yum. But from my perspective, where apt-get existed first and worked very well, and then yum arrived and is so damn slow, the choice is easy: apt-get all the way.
We could probably go on for a while like that. My point is, as a long time user I don't feel tools that are put in the distro are always choosen very wisely. It seems to me good/bad software is thrown in/out lightly. Is it some kind of disdain or something? If you want linux to be massively adopted on the desktop one day, you'll have to settle on some fairly standard tools, stand behind them and stop wasting time to rebuild much of same.
Cheers
