RedHat

August 29th, 2003 3:12 AM

I installed RedHat 9 on mangala a couple of days ago, and I’m not impressed. So here are some gripes that come to mind immediately:

  • The installer didn’t give me the option of booting into the CLI.
  • The X/Gnome environment now feels disturbingly like running Windows. I run Linux specifically so that I don’t have to run Windows!
  • Not including the xmms-mp3 package is weak.

On the plus side, upgrading finally allows me to see the full 160GB on hellas. Now I just need to find some place to stash a hundred gigs so that I can re-partition.

Oh, and I got around to setting up a vlc multicast from mangala so that I can “tune-in” to the stream on my Titanium, ares, and watch all my favorite shows with no hassle.

Anyway, my impression is that RedHat has finally lost direction. There’s no compelling reason to stick with RedHat in the future (some people might suggest that there never was to begine with). Another distro (Debian or Gentoo or even BlueEyed when it starts to become more stable) or another OS (FreeBSD or OpenBSD which unfortunately doesn’t yet have full SMP support) will be the way to go in the near future.

Comments

It pisses me off that they keep moving stuff. I’m not arguing whether one location for one file is better, just that constistency is a good thing. Conf files and other files keep mysteriously changing locations. My only reason for staying with redhat is the whole up2date thing which gives me reasonably new packages. I don’t want to spend time searching for what has been updated, building it for my distro, and installing em. Maybe thats because I’m lazy… but I still don’t want to do it.

Posted by: Wonko on August 29th, 2003 2:08 PM