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Ars Technica review
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  1. #1
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    Ars Technica review


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    Re: Ars Technica review

    yes good article.

    I got a good laugh from quote of matthew miller from the article

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    It was a good review. Too bad the comment section went south. So many misconceptions and just pure hate for Fedora.

    I never understood why Fedora has the label as a difficult distro.
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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Quote Originally Posted by DokterW
    I never understood why Fedora has the label as a difficult distro.
    Cognitive resonance, blind hatred and intentional ignorance to name a few.
    Desktop CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - Memory: 64GB DDR4-RAM - GPU: Sapphire Nitro+ Pure Radeon RX 6950XT 16GB Storage: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 GB NVMe, Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe and NAS WD 7200 RPM 4TB for backup - OS: Fedora 38 Design Suite x86-64 and Windows 11 64-bit
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    Re: Ars Technica review

    I just glanced through the comments, and while I saw some dislike for Gnome 3, I didn't see hatred. I saw a few people saying it's unstable, but that was about it. I didn't read closely nor go past the first page, but at least, to a casual viewer of the article, the comments weren't anything horrible (at least on the first page.)

    I don't use Gnome, and don't know if my general impression that there's fewer complaints than there used to be here are due to improvements, or perhaps just those who disliked it going to a different DE.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Quote Originally Posted by smr54
    I do agree but I sort of got the impression that he would like to dislike Fedora 24.

    As for "Fedora releases tend to be rough around the edges". I did not have any issues with installing Fedora 24 although I don't do updates because I always find that a fresh install is quicker and you have less possibility of leftover fluff. Documentation is important if you do this although you should document no matter what you do.

    When I say documentation I don't mean a complete disaster recovery scenario although you can if you wish. What I do is list my filesystems and their sizes followed by any additional packages that I want. I also document any additional housekeeping such as repos, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group to name a few (always save /etc to somewhere safe).

    From the article "waiting means you can skip catastrophic bugs like the one that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update."

    Really I have Fedora 24 running on my Skylake chipset and did not see any issues and I have gone from Fedora 23 (again no issues) to Fedora 24 (within a day of it's release).

    "If you're OK with the frequency of Fedora updates and want a release-oriented distro, I would not hesitate to recommend Fedora 24. Even with a couple of issues, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've tested this year, including Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 18. Just make sure you take it for a test drive before you jump in with both feet."

    You have always been able to control the update process on Fedora (ie. daily, weekly, never, automatic or manual) and you always have the option of deciding if and when you do a reboot. Updates, when you choose to do them are non-intrusive like pretty much all Linux distributions

    No matter which Linux distribution you choose it is always a good idea to test it using the Live distribution first before making the decision to install.

    O!h I did have a problem with Kdenlive in that it caused the update process to fail (about four days ago). The fix was to remove it and reinstall at a later date which I did without any issues. Of course, I could have waited a few days and then do another update.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Is this the right place to start a new thread of conversation about how to open a CLI for this novice to ask questions ?

    ---------- Post added at 06:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:34 PM ----------

    Apparently NOT as I am now seeing my question posted "Re: Ars Technica review". Where, then does one start a new thread?

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Take a look through the Forums. The descriptions (and perhaps a brief read) should suggest the forum in which to start a thread. Once you get to an appropriate forum / thread, use Forum Tools / Post a New Thread to get started. You might also come across a thread that is generally aligned with the comments / questions you want to post.

    Review the forum 'Tips About The Forum' for a good grounding in the ways of Fedora Forum. There is a thread 'Posting In The Forum' that gives some good pointers.

    Best of luck!
    Last edited by jims; 7th September 2016 at 02:55 AM. Reason: Additional info on Posting In The Forum thread
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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Ha-ha, I thought the release cycle was every 12 months. It shows how little I know. The article says every 8 months.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    As a long-time Fedora user (basically ever since RedHat went out of the personal user space), I can recall over the years people talking about it being "bleeding edge", and really couldn't understand what they meant by that, since generally a lot of the old issues like trying to find this or that driver gradually melted away.
    Recent versions, however, have tended to be not so much bleeding edge as much as initially unusable.
    I ended up completely skipping F22 after spending an entire weekend trying to get it to work, only to reinstall F21.
    F23 wasn't so bad, but F24 has been a challenge, starting with serious problems with wifi on my laptop, then with an intermittent failure to finish booting. It's hard to tell, but the sense I get is that some of these things relate to certain kernel versions.
    So I do sense that there is increasing roughness in new versions when they're first released.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg P
    As a long-time Fedora user (basically ever since RedHat went out of the personal user space), I can recall over the years people talking about it being "bleeding edge", and really couldn't understand what they meant by that, since generally a lot of the old issues like trying to find this or that driver gradually melted away.
    Recent versions, however, have tended to be not so much bleeding edge as much as initially unusable.
    I ended up completely skipping F22 after spending an entire weekend trying to get it to work, only to reinstall F21.
    F23 wasn't so bad, but F24 has been a challenge, starting with serious problems with wifi on my laptop, then with an intermittent failure to finish booting. It's hard to tell, but the sense I get is that some of these things relate to certain kernel versions.
    So I do sense that there is increasing roughness in new versions when they're first released.
    I do have an HP DV6306TX laptop (over 8 years old) and an HP dv7 4035TX (over 6 years old) as well as the latest Skylake Core 4 i7 6700 Desktop that I built myself. All except the dv7 laptop are running Fedora 24 KDE spin flawlessly with over 1900 packages. The dv7 laptop is still running Fedora 23 KDE spin but unfortunately it has a tendency to overheat (exhaust fan is faulty) and I have not bothered to fix it.

    The only WiFi issue I ever had was with FC7 on my DV6306TX laptop which was solvable but if I remember rightly when Fedora 8 or 9 was released that annoyance went away.

    IMHO installing a day one release of Fedora is fine if you don't have a machine that has specialized hardware such as TV tuners or Bluray (normally problems with playback are a DRM issue) and it always pays to check the web first and if you are still unsure check out the Live edition first. Actually, laptops are usually the worst offenders for incompatibility issues and I would wait at least a week or more before attempting an upgrade or install.

    Where you can get into trouble is if you do an update on an existing Fedora installation (again fine if you have a fairly generic PC). Personally, I always recommend a fresh install since you don't carry over any fluff from your last install.

    I have had arguments with colleagues on this but when I do a fresh install (not just Linux but Unix as well) even on machines that cost in the order of millions of dollars in an hour or two compared to updates that can fail spectacularly with you end having to explain to management why it's taking too long usually most people come round to my way of thinking.

    An install of Fedora, providing you have your filesystems set up correctly should take about 30 minutes (usually less). Customization (obviously they do need to be documented) should take another 30 minutes although that depends on the customization required. After that, your update should take about an hour although this does depend on your network connection.

    Note: When I say that your filesystems should be setup correctly I mean that it is fine to reformat your system filesystems but definitely not your data filesystems such as "/home". Obviously, it should go without saying but you should backup prior to any update or re-installation. Resizing a file system is definitely doable but you really do have to have a clear understanding of LVM (in many case resizing can be done live) and the filesystem you are using.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    The two areas I have had issues with in recent versions have been wifi (Broadcom), and with Intel graphics chips.
    Having tried fedup with some horrendous experiences, I usually do a netinstall after backing up everything. Two things I like about netinstall is being able to set up KDE easily and then pick collections of packages, and the second is that at least in theory once it's done you shouldn't have to immediately do an update. One thing I would also like to be able to do is to chose fastestmirror instead of closest mirror. At least where I live (Louisville, KY), the closest mirrors are at best Ok, at worst awful - my laptop took 4-6 hours just to download all the packages.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg P
    The two areas I have had issues with in recent versions have been wifi (Broadcom), and with Intel graphics chips.
    Having tried fedup with some horrendous experiences, I usually do a netinstall after backing up everything. Two things I like about netinstall is being able to set up KDE easily and then pick collections of packages, and the second is that at least in theory once it's done you shouldn't have to immediately do an update. One thing I would also like to be able to do is to chose fastestmirror instead of closest mirror. At least where I live (Louisville, KY), the closest mirrors are at best Ok, at worst awful - my laptop took 4-6 hours just to download all the packages.
    If I remember rightly my 8-year-old laptop had a broadcom WiFi and it was a pain to get it working initially. You would think by now that this would not be happening although I don't have any problems with my 8 year old laptop now.

    Have you tried the Fedora 24 Live boot? It's only 1.4 GB and you install (not copy) it on a 4GB or larger USB stick. If you have problems there*** then I would not recommend Fedora for your laptop.

    ***Note: You may have to run your Live version of Fedora under test mode rather than the default and I did not have problems when I finally decided to install.

    To be honest I have never tried Fedora netinstall since I prefer a fresh install every time a new version of the particular distribution comes out. I have been doing this since Fedora Core 3 and rarely have problems.

    I also document all additional packages I need so it just a simple matter of copy & paste to get those packages back . Of course, you also document that you need rpmfusion or any additional repo files (such as Chrome). Saving /etc to your home directory (as root for security purposes) can be very helpful.

    As for Intel graphics, I actually have a GX_Z170M_D3H motherboard for my Desktop and I use the inbuilt Intel graphics via it's HDMI port (although the DVI port also works). Since I also have a PS4 connected to the other HDMI port on my monitor toggling works within seconds. With my DVI port when I toggle back the port drops signal so I don't use it.

    Where I live (Sydney Australia) I have Broadband and can get speeds up to 4MB/sec (averages about 2MB/s) and a fresh install including customization takes me about an hour with all updates taking an additional hour. Of course, if I have to recover my personal files then I am looking at about 3~5 hours and that is from my backup disks.

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    Re: Ars Technica review

    I read the link about the history of Linux, including the Appendix where Linux had discussions with Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum about micro kernels. I think that in those days, they were quite heated, but today,
    Leslie in Montreal

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