As I have been checking deeper into distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE there's one thing that Debian still lacks. It feels really unpolished compared to the former.
Why?
In Ubuntu, if you use Files (GNOME file manager) right-click and try to share a folder it will ask you to download Samba and configure it for you.
In Debian I would get funny errors because Samba isn't configured at all. This was one of my experiences with Dolphin that I would right-click and try to share a folder with the other Windows computers and it wouldn't
What is Debian? It's something that I've been pondering for a while. Debian's site doesn't have a welcoming design like Fedora one does. The community (forums) seems like a passive-aggressive sort of bunch (although honestly it feels like it's like that with most Linux communities). So is Debian just a distribution template for other based distributions to copy? Maybe.
Another example, this time unrelated to KDE is the GNOME experience in Debian jessie/testing. Sure, you would argue that it's unreleased. Fine, it's a total valid point but hear me out:
I couldn't for the life of me CHANGE the language to Spanish in GNOME Debian. I went to the expected place to change the settings but the option wasn't there at all. In Ubuntu, it will give you the option to install the Spanish language package and make that user use the Spanish language while other accounts maintains the English language as default.
The GNOME 3.12 account integration with other services was well done. Of course, in Ubuntu it was just plain better.
I haven't checked Fedora yet. I'm actually downloading it right now to see how polished is Fedora.
As much as people hate Ubuntu, because it seems to be the popular thing to do Ubuntu does a lot of things right that the desktop experience needs. You can hate it all you want, it won't remove the fact that Ubuntu just wins hands down.
This is not about "well, I prefer is the distribution would let me configure the installed software rather than it making the decisions by itself". Fine, you like to waste time and configure your own stuff. That's great, but you are missing the point. This so called "newbie distro" is aiming to be things that other distributions couldn't do and that is to bring a easy to use GNU/Linux desktop and see that sharing, installing printers, etc is working as expected.
Showing posts with label fedora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fedora. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
dpkg -i mistakes-0.10.deb: 24 hours into Fedora 20
I did a very stupid mistake yesterday. Oh yes, I did learn from my mistakes very much, thank you!
So I installed Fedora 20 on my main desktop. As some of you know I use Debian 7 (Wheezy) for my main desktop--isn't that "old"? Well, I can play Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, install the latest NVIDIA drivers, etc, so yea, it works wonder for me.
That's not the point though, far from it. I had problems with Fedora 20 I never thought I would run into, maybe because I'm not that experience with its whole ecosystem and vast libraries. However, I'm more of an end-user than anything else. There are things in Fedora 20 that were real deal breakers for me.
Just a note: This post is not meant to be an attack against Fedora distribution or its users.
I told myself yesterday, "you know what? I'm gonna go install Fedora and use it until Debian 8 is out", and that I did! After testing the distro in my overly abused virtualbox hard drive it was more than obvious that Fedora is a very stable distribution.
So, let's start with things I didn't like so we can later concentrate on things I did like:
Fedora 20 Installation process:
Fedora uses anaconda to manage all the installation tasks, get the user info, etc. One of the things that was a heavy deal breaker was how IMPOSSIBLE it was to create a partition with rest of the space available. The case was the following:
I have my /home separated, like any sane person would, and well it was a total of 4 partitions: /, /home, /boot, /another_partition. These were existing partitions and they have never failed me in any way. So, what went wrong?
Fedora didn't want to use the remainder of the space left for my root partition. What it did was the following: It created a root partition of 8.523 GB, and there was NO WAY to alter that value because it would revert to it.
After battling with the partition manager--which I wasn't that comfortable with in the first place--the installation finished. I booted it up, entered my credentials and surprise! Another issue: I think this is because Fedora 20 has SELinux in a more strict mode, I'm not sure if I'm correct here. The thing is that they were permission errors and I had to do a restorecon to fix my /home and finally it would let me enter.
It wasn't much of a problem. I won't lie, I thought Fedora messed up my /home partition, it scared the hell out of me. Usually I've done like 4-5 retaining my /home partition with no backup. I know, I know. It's a bad idea, right? So anyway, it was a solid KDE experience. Everything worked! So you know what this means right? Install ALL DEM APPS AND DEPENDENCIES!
Alright there's a problem. I love yum. I love how cohesive it is, you don't have the silly "apt-file, apt-whatever", instead you can use yum whatprovides and it works flawlessly. BUT! The naming convention for the libraries is a bit nuts. You can have lowercase library names, you can also have lower/upper libraries and it's MADDENING. It's not a big deal, right? Well, that's what I thought until I ended up wasting more time reaching my shift key and deleting characters, even the tab for auto-completition didn't help.
I could live with it though. But then the following case happened: I installed steam through rpmfusion. It was easy and straightforward, yet finding the DEPENDENCIES for each game was itself the biggest chore ever. And some of the dependencies I installed didn't even work when ldd reported to me that the library is not found. The dependencies problems were making me go insane because not only that happened, I couldn't even play a mkv/mp4 video because for some reason it didn't pull the libvpx.
Now, I know that what I'm going to say may or may not bother you but: In Debian if I pulled from the repos mpd or smplayer it made sure to pull all the required and optional libraries. You might object "why install the optional library?!", for the very same reason that we must think of the end-user. It's not about having a tidy, minimal installation. To me, if you can't provide a decent experience that I have to go on hunting then there's something horribly wrong with the user experience.
Now, without further ado: What I liked about Fedora 20:
- Stability. It felt incredibly rock solid for a distribution that has like 2-3 years cycle. I do wish they extended the support up to 3-4 years but Fedora is bleeding edge itself and they do a seriously great job.
- yum - I really like yum, like I said before it felt really great using it.
- Installation - Despite my crappy experience with the partition section, the installation was the shortest and most straightforward thing ever. This is great for anyone lacking technical experience.
- A polished KDE experience
- Useful sites and tools like Fedy, rpmfusion, fedorapeople repos.
I went back to Debian. In less than 2-3 hours I had my setup running with all the applications I used. Funny enough before running apt-get install kde-full I installed openbox, lightdm, thunar, xterm, smplayer, zsh. I mounted my other hard drive disk and proceeded to watch TV Series while kde-full finished installing.
Will I revisit Fedora? I think that yea, maybe in a near future I will. But not as my main OS.
So I installed Fedora 20 on my main desktop. As some of you know I use Debian 7 (Wheezy) for my main desktop--isn't that "old"? Well, I can play Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, install the latest NVIDIA drivers, etc, so yea, it works wonder for me.
That's not the point though, far from it. I had problems with Fedora 20 I never thought I would run into, maybe because I'm not that experience with its whole ecosystem and vast libraries. However, I'm more of an end-user than anything else. There are things in Fedora 20 that were real deal breakers for me.
Just a note: This post is not meant to be an attack against Fedora distribution or its users.
I told myself yesterday, "you know what? I'm gonna go install Fedora and use it until Debian 8 is out", and that I did! After testing the distro in my overly abused virtualbox hard drive it was more than obvious that Fedora is a very stable distribution.
So, let's start with things I didn't like so we can later concentrate on things I did like:
Fedora 20 Installation process:
Fedora uses anaconda to manage all the installation tasks, get the user info, etc. One of the things that was a heavy deal breaker was how IMPOSSIBLE it was to create a partition with rest of the space available. The case was the following:
I have my /home separated, like any sane person would, and well it was a total of 4 partitions: /, /home, /boot, /another_partition. These were existing partitions and they have never failed me in any way. So, what went wrong?
Fedora didn't want to use the remainder of the space left for my root partition. What it did was the following: It created a root partition of 8.523 GB, and there was NO WAY to alter that value because it would revert to it.
After battling with the partition manager--which I wasn't that comfortable with in the first place--the installation finished. I booted it up, entered my credentials and surprise! Another issue: I think this is because Fedora 20 has SELinux in a more strict mode, I'm not sure if I'm correct here. The thing is that they were permission errors and I had to do a restorecon to fix my /home and finally it would let me enter.
It wasn't much of a problem. I won't lie, I thought Fedora messed up my /home partition, it scared the hell out of me. Usually I've done like 4-5 retaining my /home partition with no backup. I know, I know. It's a bad idea, right? So anyway, it was a solid KDE experience. Everything worked! So you know what this means right? Install ALL DEM APPS AND DEPENDENCIES!
Alright there's a problem. I love yum. I love how cohesive it is, you don't have the silly "apt-file, apt-whatever", instead you can use yum whatprovides and it works flawlessly. BUT! The naming convention for the libraries is a bit nuts. You can have lowercase library names, you can also have lower/upper libraries and it's MADDENING. It's not a big deal, right? Well, that's what I thought until I ended up wasting more time reaching my shift key and deleting characters, even the tab for auto-completition didn't help.
I could live with it though. But then the following case happened: I installed steam through rpmfusion. It was easy and straightforward, yet finding the DEPENDENCIES for each game was itself the biggest chore ever. And some of the dependencies I installed didn't even work when ldd reported to me that the library is not found. The dependencies problems were making me go insane because not only that happened, I couldn't even play a mkv/mp4 video because for some reason it didn't pull the libvpx.
Now, I know that what I'm going to say may or may not bother you but: In Debian if I pulled from the repos mpd or smplayer it made sure to pull all the required and optional libraries. You might object "why install the optional library?!", for the very same reason that we must think of the end-user. It's not about having a tidy, minimal installation. To me, if you can't provide a decent experience that I have to go on hunting then there's something horribly wrong with the user experience.
Now, without further ado: What I liked about Fedora 20:
- Stability. It felt incredibly rock solid for a distribution that has like 2-3 years cycle. I do wish they extended the support up to 3-4 years but Fedora is bleeding edge itself and they do a seriously great job.
- yum - I really like yum, like I said before it felt really great using it.
- Installation - Despite my crappy experience with the partition section, the installation was the shortest and most straightforward thing ever. This is great for anyone lacking technical experience.
- A polished KDE experience
- Useful sites and tools like Fedy, rpmfusion, fedorapeople repos.
I went back to Debian. In less than 2-3 hours I had my setup running with all the applications I used. Funny enough before running apt-get install kde-full I installed openbox, lightdm, thunar, xterm, smplayer, zsh. I mounted my other hard drive disk and proceeded to watch TV Series while kde-full finished installing.
Will I revisit Fedora? I think that yea, maybe in a near future I will. But not as my main OS.
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