Off the top of my head, and keeping in mind that I gave up after Fedora 1 and have been happily using a hard drive install of Knoppix for a while now:
My biggest gripe is that they've gotten so wimpy about patents that they're yanking stuff BEFORE it becomes an issue. Stuff like mp3 playback (not encoding, _playback_) and xpdf. Nobody sued over it, they just yanked it preemptively. I suspect the only reason they haven't yanked the linux kernel on patent grounds is they couldn't use the name if they did that. Oh yeah, THESE people are going to fight the good fight over decss. Someday this distro will turn into a viable desktop solution where we can play DVDs. Yeah. Sure.
They happily shipped binary-only proprietary crap for years, yet they don't ship the free flash plugin or realaudio or things we might actually care about as end-users. (By all means, make "install binary-only crap" an install-time option for people who don't want it.)
I now have less of an idea who is in charge of it. I used to know who to report an issue to and get enough of an acknowledgement to be confident that if it wasn't fixed it was because they'd decided not to fix it. Now, I don't know whose responsibility anything is, since the fedora developers presumably dumped that responsibility on a community that doesn't even have CVS access...?
Knoppix autodetected all my hardware a year ago. I have never had a version of Red Hat that set up my sound card properly. This is because they don't care about the desktop.
I don't like Gnome, and I got tired of them shoving it down my throat. Forcing it to boot KDE and finding they'd replaced most of the kde apps with gnome apps _IN_KDE_ was just obnoxious.
They don't install OpenOffice, they install an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license so it can download stuff from the net. Either you have an RPM that ACTUALLY INSTALLS OPENOFFICE, or you don't. Having an RPM I can install so I DON'T have openoffice is just _stupid_. What are they trying to do, taunt me?
I don't want to have to hunt around to pop up an xterm. They've been burying it deeper and deeper under nested menus for a while now.
They broke _little_ things, like installing a new kernel calls whatever that sbin/install-kernel script is that, for the past couple of years on redhat, barfed if /lib/modules/$KERNELVERSION didn't already exist. When the next revision came out, this still hadn't been fixed. (I don't even WANT an initial ramdisk.)
I bought a cheap "linux comes preinstalled and the 3D acceleration actually _works_" box as Fry's, and attempted to replace the strange distro that came on it with Fedora Core 2. The boot kernel on the Fedora CD wouldn't run, because it was optimized for a Pentium III. The box had a Via Samuel II processor, a low power 800 mhz processor that acts like a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions, but not the full Pentium III instruction set. Yes, a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions was too old and broken to run Fedora Core 2, even though the hardware was brand new and built for linux.
I could go on, but the yellow streak about patents is inexcusable. The rest just got me over the inertia of having been a Red Hat user since 5.something, but the patent stupidity is why I'm never going back. There IS no "safe position" to retreat to. EVERYTHING infringes because stupid things are patented that shouldn't be patentable, and other things are patented in blatent disregard of 50 years of prior art. Red Hat (and it is Red Hat: the Fedora group is a powerless figurehead) is backing down in the face of threats that HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN MADE YET. That's just crazy.
I fully agree with you that the Fedora people are hurting themselves and the distribution by being, as you put it "wimpy about patents".
As for installing "an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license...." it dawns on me that the Fedora people may not have a lot of choice about that; the OO people may be insisting on that setup so that they can make sure their license is seen before OO is installed. (They can do that, since OO has a separate copyright from the rest of the distribution....)
By the way, my understanding of Eric's main gripe with Fedora as it stands now (which I may have gotten wrong) is this. Eric's real interest in Fedora was to make interim installs easier by not requiring him to do a full install. However, as it is configured now, Fedora simply stops installing if it encounters an app that requires libraries or some other kind of component in order to run that isn't present. It doesn't just refuse to install the app; it halts the install altogether, without telling you what went wrong, and you either have to install the entire distribution from scratch or figure out what went wrong and get the necessary components before attempting to do your interim install again. As Eric sees it, that destroys the value of being able to just download updates off the Internet.
I don't know, Matt. I don't know whether Eric or anyone else has posted anything about their gripes with Fedora. Rob's comment describes one beef a lot of folks have, and I'm going to try to describe what I understand to be Eric's main problem with Fedora elsewhere.
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What's wrong with Fedora.
My biggest gripe is that they've gotten so wimpy about patents that they're yanking stuff BEFORE it becomes an issue. Stuff like mp3 playback (not encoding, _playback_) and xpdf. Nobody sued over it, they just yanked it preemptively. I suspect the only reason they haven't yanked the linux kernel on patent grounds is they couldn't use the name if they did that. Oh yeah, THESE people are going to fight the good fight over decss. Someday this distro will turn into a viable desktop solution where we can play DVDs. Yeah. Sure.
They happily shipped binary-only proprietary crap for years, yet they don't ship the free flash plugin or realaudio or things we might actually care about as end-users. (By all means, make "install binary-only crap" an install-time option for people who don't want it.)
I now have less of an idea who is in charge of it. I used to know who to report an issue to and get enough of an acknowledgement to be confident that if it wasn't fixed it was because they'd decided not to fix it. Now, I don't know whose responsibility anything is, since the fedora developers presumably dumped that responsibility on a community that doesn't even have CVS access...?
Knoppix autodetected all my hardware a year ago. I have never had a version of Red Hat that set up my sound card properly. This is because they don't care about the desktop.
I don't like Gnome, and I got tired of them shoving it down my throat. Forcing it to boot KDE and finding they'd replaced most of the kde apps with gnome apps _IN_KDE_ was just obnoxious.
They don't install OpenOffice, they install an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license so it can download stuff from the net. Either you have an RPM that ACTUALLY INSTALLS OPENOFFICE, or you don't. Having an RPM I can install so I DON'T have openoffice is just _stupid_. What are they trying to do, taunt me?
I don't want to have to hunt around to pop up an xterm. They've been burying it deeper and deeper under nested menus for a while now.
They broke _little_ things, like installing a new kernel calls whatever that sbin/install-kernel script is that, for the past couple of years on redhat, barfed if /lib/modules/$KERNELVERSION didn't already exist. When the next revision came out, this still hadn't been fixed. (I don't even WANT an initial ramdisk.)
I bought a cheap "linux comes preinstalled and the 3D acceleration actually _works_" box as Fry's, and attempted to replace the strange distro that came on it with Fedora Core 2. The boot kernel on the Fedora CD wouldn't run, because it was optimized for a Pentium III. The box had a Via Samuel II processor, a low power 800 mhz processor that acts like a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions, but not the full Pentium III instruction set. Yes, a Pentium with MMX and 3DNow extensions was too old and broken to run Fedora Core 2, even though the hardware was brand new and built for linux.
I could go on, but the yellow streak about patents is inexcusable. The rest just got me over the inertia of having been a Red Hat user since 5.something, but the patent stupidity is why I'm never going back. There IS no "safe position" to retreat to. EVERYTHING infringes because stupid things are patented that shouldn't be patentable, and other things are patented in blatent disregard of 50 years of prior art. Red Hat (and it is Red Hat: the Fedora group is a powerless figurehead) is backing down in the face of threats that HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN MADE YET. That's just crazy.
Rob
Re: What's wrong with Fedora.
As for installing "an OpenOffice installer that, when I click on it, wants me to agree to a license...." it dawns on me that the Fedora people may not have a lot of choice about that; the OO people may be insisting on that setup so that they can make sure their license is seen before OO is installed. (They can do that, since OO has a separate copyright from the rest of the distribution....)
By the way, my understanding of Eric's main gripe with Fedora as it stands now (which I may have gotten wrong) is this. Eric's real interest in Fedora was to make interim installs easier by not requiring him to do a full install. However, as it is configured now, Fedora simply stops installing if it encounters an app that requires libraries or some other kind of component in order to run that isn't present. It doesn't just refuse to install the app; it halts the install altogether, without telling you what went wrong, and you either have to install the entire distribution from scratch or figure out what went wrong and get the necessary components before attempting to do your interim install again. As Eric sees it, that destroys the value of being able to just download updates off the Internet.
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