Fedora (Linux) is Destroying it self

Ian Chapman packages at amiga-hardware.com
Mon May 11 17:57:23 UTC 2009


Michael Nielsen wrote:

> 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.

These are really development decisions made by Gnome upstream. It's 
really not as if you don't have plenty of alternatives to choose from.

> 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 

If you require a persistent network connection without logging into X, 
you can always switch off the NetworkManager service and use the network 
service instead.

> 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 

Simply not true. Right this moment I'm copying podcasts to my mp3 player 
which was mounted directly by Gnome. It's accessible under /media/disk. 
My external USB drive, the partitions for the other OSs I have 
installed, my SD cards, camera etc are all available in a similar way.

> 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 

I'm surprised at this one. This is a big plus for me. As someone who 
regularly has to deal with Solaris systems amongst others, I get tired 
of playing guess the location of the binary, hunt the man page and 
setting an ever increasing $PATH.

> 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 

Unfortunately Linux has suffered countless audio 'standards' and many 
applications have been slow to catch up with the standard du jour, if at 
all. Probably the single thing I most hate having to deal with when it 
doesn't just work.

> wrong. The original concept for unix was to install an application such 
> as firefox in either, /opt or /usr/local/.

IIRC /opt was intended for self contained applications, which provide 
their own tree. They are often statically compiled or depend only upon 
libraries and files found in their own tree. They can be a complete PITA 
to deal with. /usr/local I believe was intended to for installing 
software locally to a specific machine or a group of machines without 
interfering with system files or vice versa. Often the filesystems 
weren't even local but NFS mounted from a server or similar. Good 
package management and the fact that in general, most of the filesystems 
these days are local has negated those reasons and /usr/local is 
frequently (mis)used in other ways.

> 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.

Exactly, I refer to the PATH hell earlier. Additionally LD_LIBRARY_PATH 
is considered a security risk by many, especially when many OSs have had 
alternatives for years.

> 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.

Curious. I maintain many Linux servers without a GUI installed. I don't 
think I've had a requirement to configure anything that's required a 
GUI. If by moving, you mean providing GUI tools for configuration tasks 
that have traditionally required a command line, I'm all for it.

-- 
Ian Chapman.




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