Tuesday, January 17, 2006
I spent some time playing with Fedora Core 5 test 2 today. I did this principally because there are a lot of nice friendly scheme RPM's out there to play with and becuase the Bigloo package on Arch Linux is little broken in that it doesn't provide bee or any sensible way to install it.
Now I was in the Fedora community way back when Red Hat first spiralled out it's non-commercial distro, and I left that community because, despite using the word twice so far in this paragraph, the last thing it Fedora had was a "community".
Even though Red Hat is freeing it's grip on Fedora a little more now, I still see some big issues that haven't faded. What's so shocking about Fedora is that despite the obvious effort and polish that's been invested broadly in the OS some really fundemental parts of the distro are still totally broken.
YUM sucks. It really sucks. Sure it's a big improvement on RPM on it's own, but compared to apt, emerge or pacman it moves on a geological timescale, is annoying to use and makes upgrading packages a painful experience.
Wireless support also sucks, Fedora is one of the few distros I've come across that can't get an IPW2100 working with relative ease. Gentoo is another, the wireless configuration there annoys the hell out of me, but at least it works. Ubuntu, Novell and SuSe can all set the card up with only a couple of questions to the user. Arch leaves it to the user, but it's well documented and the config files are trivial. Fedora wraps it in a worthless GUI that thinks the card is a normal ethernet card and gives no sensible indication that I needed to go and hunt the web for a package.
Those things are a real shame, because between them they're going to keep me far away from a distro that really has got it's house in order around development tools, and can now boast a really nicely put together Gnome desktop with Mono support.
I could use Debian or Ubuntu of course to deal with the Scheme installations. Those distro are quite well supported from that point of view (or Gentoo if the wireless config didn't make me sooooooo angry). Instead it's back to Arch - the only distro that ever really fulfills me, and where I can knock up a new package in a matter of minutes and be happy.
