Good bye, Fedora

Link: “ESR: ‘Fedora… you blew it’” (LinuxWatch).

Eric’s criticism concerning Red Hat/Fedora is 100% true. It is what I, Fedora Core unlucky user, may confirm. I installed FC-4 on my shine new box in 2005, looking for simplicity and manageability after almost 3 years of struggling with Gentoo’s portages. Before I was on few Red Hats and Mandrakes so RPM-based package management was quite familiar for me with all its problems and “dependency hell” nightmares. But I hoped that for these years the things were improved and there was a lot of talking about yum, so I believed my life on my new machine and a system from respected Red Hat brand would be easy as it was never before.

I was wrong. In fact, Fedora package management worked fine only on initial stage of installing its own packages from DVD. So, I was almost happy until I tried to upgrade something. Heck, how it may be happened that the main system package-management tool (yeah, I mean yum) simply didn’t work in a production release? There was a problem with Python libraries and when I finally managed to fix it, my system already was a spaghetti of Fedora “native” packages, RPM’s downloaded manually from anywhere in the world, sourcecode builds and so on. Even when I got yum working, I am afraid to run it on the whole system, because it told me it was going to replace my already installed software with older versions, castrated multimedia packages with no MP3 support (whatever all that licensing stuff means, this is a foolish decision, imho), gcc versions which were deprecated in the most of the sourcecode releases and so on. I suspected it would end up with breaking all the things down and burying the months of working on make my system usable.

So, this is what the system (which long ago was “Fedora Core IV”) is now:

• Custom 2.6.14 kernel built from sources. I replaced FC default kernel almost immediately after installation, because I really needed a custom kernel – all right, nothing wrong with Fedora here.
• KDE and KDE apps installed and managed via Konstruct. In fact, this is the most stable and manageable part of my system and I upgrade it regularly and painlessly (maybe ‘coz it is completely independent from distro ;-) )
• Few Fedora packages managed via yum. Really a few – only X.org, Eclipse, GIMP and GTK+ libs come in my mind.
• A bunch of RPM packages installed outside of yum as well as the software installed separately and compiled from source tarballs.

As 8 years ago, my favorite commands sequence is “configure-make-make install” and the web-sites like this and this are the top hits in my bookmarks.

Should we be surprised to hear that Linux is hard to use and all that stuff?

Resume:
If someone say “wow! he is kinda advanced Linux user if he can live with that mash-up” I’d answer – Shut up! I hate to be this “advanced user”! I’m tired and annoyed and I’m not gonna spend the days of my life to make my tools working. Indeed, I’ve got a lot of more interesting and important things to do. And I’m not so young to compile software from sources.

All what I want is to enter “apt-get something” to get what I need. Yes, I’m moving to Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu ‘coz I’m not a fan of Gnome) immediately after 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” final release.

Just ‘coz a life is too short.