On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 15:56 +0200, Michael Nielsen wrote: > Hi, > > I've been told this is the right place to place this debate starter. > > > Not to demean the fine work that has been done in maintaining fedora, > however the distribution is slowly killing itself, being destroyed by > contradicting philosophies. Many of the problems have been directly > copied from the Windows world. > > The main problems are. > > 1. Removal of features - the user interfaces are being dumbed down, like > recently I've searched for the ability to remove the "Raise on Click" > feature that is default for Gnome MetaCity, there does not appear to be > any such feature anymore / argument being to simplify how it works.. > Fine, create a simple view and an advanced view for the configuration > tools, so that people who are clueless about any other way than the > official Redmond way, can avoid being confronted with an alternative. > > 2. The network interfaces are being bound to the user interface, such > that if your X fails for some reason, or you are running on a text > console, you are unable to open the wireless configuration, at least > it's not obvious how you do it, without X running. The configuration for > the network interfaces are so tightly bound to the user interface, such > that if there is no user interface there are no network interfaces. This is false. NetworkManager will read (and write!) system network configuration for wired & wireless devices, and can bring those devices up before login. I think what you may be missing is an easy one-command tool to activate/deactivate those, and that's fairly simple with dbus-send, and yes, its something that should be written. But in now way is network tied to a UI or unusable without a UI. Dan > 3. Mounts are also embedded into the user interface, rather than in the > unix mount system, which means that the shares are not accessible for > non-gui programs, for instance, I like to script most thing I do often, > however, there is no way for scripts to get a hold of a drive that is > mounted through the gui mount system (kde and gnome). > > 4. Everything is thrown in huge collective directories, such as > /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc, and it is a huge mess, just like windows with > it's system32 directory, which is also a huge mess. really the > /usr/bin,/bin/sbin, /lib etc, has very specific purposes, and should > represent a core operating system, that is capable of being used as > repair, with no major applications present. However even Open office is > stored in these directories. > > 5. More and more services are bound up in the userinterface, such as the > pulse audio, which is started by the GUI, this means if you use 2 user > environments, which I often do for testing, where I have X:0 and X:1 > running, the GUIs will conflict, because you cannot run two instances of > pulseaudio. In addition pulse audio is crap, I have yet to see any > installation actually work without crackling, and chopping like crazy. I > like the concept that is the basis of pulse audio, but it just does not > work. > > 6. NetworkManager which appears to be installed default, does not work > with shared drives, because, the NetworkManager is shut down before the > network drives are detached, and you need to modify the NetworkManager > to start properly, before you mount the network drives. I've gotten used > to explicit uninstalling the NetworkManager, because it just doesn't > work properly. > > It is a lengthy discussion to describe what i mean. > > However, if I take a sample application like firefox, it presents a > reasonable proxy for what I mean. > > currently default installation of firefox on my machine installs firefox > in these following places. > > /usr/lib64/firefox > /usr/lib64/firefox-3.0.7 > /usr/lib/mozilla > /usr/lib64/mozilla > /usr/share/mozilla > /usr/bin/mozilla-plugin-config > /usr/bin/firefox > > etc. > > All of which are related to the firefox installation. If something goes > wrong, it's a real pain to clean it up, or even to detect what went > wrong. The original concept for unix was to install an application such > as firefox in either, /opt or /usr/local/. Such that the entire > application was contained within a single installation directory, and > then to use the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to allow the execution of the > application. > > The standard approach with /opt or /usr/local installation also makes it > triviel to have multiple installations, and configurations operating in > paralellel, by simply creating. > > /opt/mozilla/firefox -> /opt/mozilla/firefox-3.0.7 > /opt/mozilla/firefox-3.0.7 > /opt/mozilla/firefox-2.0.9 > > A user can then easily conifgure their account to use either version of > the application, without installation problems. > > Additionally using that installation method, also means that if someone > wants to use a newer version of an application, they can download the > source, and trivially install it in parallel to the package managed > application, by using the --prefix option, and the installation can > easily be removed, by simple rm -rf /opt/mozilla/firefox-3.0.7. > > With the current installation, it is nearly impossible, or at least very > difficult to find out if the package manager has cleaned up properly, or > if there is something left behind - something which is identicial to the > problem on windows. > > > > A UNIX based system is intended to have everything accessible through > standard accesses, such as the file system, and the network, however, > the current trend in moving away from having the system control things > (which I can see is easier), breaks with the ability of scripting. > > If this tendency keeps going, Linux is going to become a useless > mismatch of junk, that no one can really use for anything but a toy. > > In my opinion, the trend has been visible for about a decade, but it has > really gone downhill from about rethat 7/8.. though in Fedora 8, > everything worked fine on most machines that I installed on, apart from > some obscure drivers, however, since Fedora 8, i've yet to have a system > where the audio works properly, and with Fedora 10, the kernel Ooopses > so often it's not funny, on quite a few of my machines, to such a degree > that I'm recommending that people do not upgrade past Fedora 8, and I'm > considering dropping the Fedora line of Linux, because it is becoming > just too messy, and clumsy. > > The divergence between the "GUI" focused approach, and the "Server" > approach is not good for Linux, as it means there will be a fork, which > will be incompatible. There really isn't a good reason for this split. > > > I am wondering is anyone else concerned about, what in my opinion, is > the copying of the mistakes that Microsoft made with windows, to the > Linux environment. > > IMO it is really badly time to do a "back-to-basics" approach, and to > clean up the system. > > I'm really curious as to the reasoning for moving everything from the > standard configuration mechanisms to the gui layer, breaking > compatibility with scripting, and other standard UNIX featuers.. I'm > also curious as to the reasoning for throwing everything in one huge > mess in the /usr/bin, /bin, /sbin, etc.. As all that is achieved is to > make it hard to strip the system back to a minimal setup. > > regards > mike. > -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
