Fedora 12 is out!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 03:22:10PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I don't understand why so many people think that it is worthwhile
> disliking Fedora.  It seems to be a mild form of the hatred many of us
> have for MS Windows.  Are we on this list just too tribal?

Personally I don't care about Fedora.  I used to be a redhat user many
years ago.  I learned a lot, it was better than what I had used before
(SLS, slackware) by far, but the quality went downhill over time.
The rpm package format is certainly not easy to work with and is part
of the problems it started having.  The fact the free releases were
later discontinued (I stopped at 6.0 and remember the horrors of 7.0
and being happy not to have to deal with them).

Fedora pretends to be a community project, but when it really comes down
to it, redhat is still in charge and it is to a large extent a development
and beta testing system for future RHEL releases.  If you think I am
wrong, well that's your business, but you are probably kidding yourself.
It is certainly better in many ways than the old redhat releases were.
It now has network downloads of packages for installation (I believe),
which it certainly never used to have when I used it.  Of course when I
dropped redhat I moved to Debian, and well it had a much better package
manger, designed with the internet in mind, the package format is much
more advanced (at least in many ways, there may be a few exceptions where
rpm has an advantage), and unlike fedora of today, debian really is a
community project that doesn't play by the whims of someone's business
plan or bottom line.  So after 10 years of using debian I am sticking
to it.  I still haven't met a better linux distribution, so until I do,
I will stay put.  I have changed before, and I may do so again, just as
soon as a better system comes along.

Fedora serves the purpose of being a free redhat linux distribution,
and a test system for RHEL.  If that's what you are looking for, it does
the job.  Like every other commercially backed distribution with fixed
release dates, it has bugs when released that can be a major pain if
you hit them.  That's life with fixed release dates.  If you don't like
it, switch to something else.

> BTW, I am annoyed at MS Windows.  Today's reason is that I find it
> very difficult to get scanner software working for my father's HP
> Scanjet 4600.  It used to work but some kind of bitrot has set in (if
> I knew what kind, I could perhaps fix it). If only HP would document
> the scanner interface so that it could be supported in Linux.  Why do
> I blame Windows?  Because that ecosystem is full of fire and forget
> products.

But is this the fault of windows, or the fault of HP?  Much to my
surprise, this HP all in one crap thing I have worked right away when I
plugged it into a linux box recently.  I have no idea how to get it to
work with vista or windows 7 though.  Can't seem to find drivers for it.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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