A carnival of technology

Dear Fedora,

I think that the Fedora project has some pretty good ideas for how a Linux distribution should work.  Releases are frequent enough to keep everything shiny and new but, guided by Redhat’s commercial interests, are made with goals of pragmatism and stability.  There’s enough of a community to keep a wide range of software available and well-tested.  The focus on problems faced by desktop and laptop users ensures an intuitive, easy-to-use environment that avoids the pitfalls and annoyances that have plagued Linux in the past.  Or at least it would nice if any of that were true.

I have been using Linux since 1998 around the release of Redhat Linux 5.0.  Linux has changed a lot since then, and so have I.  At first I used it as a kind of toy, a new electronic place where the various switches and cogs of the system were thrown into stark relief for the curious.  When I started studying computers and computation at Georgia Tech, Linux, along with the other UNIX-based and UNIX-inspired operating systems available there, went from toy to a tool where the languages of computers were not tied up in projects and expensive programs but were a basic part of the system, available in every corner to transmute ideas into decisions.  And at some point in there this programmer’s playground and user’s nightmare began to transform into something more accessible.  Subsystems and tools appeared at every layer, from the kernel to the desktop environment, to make configuration easier—and automatic at best—and Linux finally started to do things in a way that people expect.  Manipulating files on a USB drive went from a four-step process to something that poppped up in front of you as soon you plugged it in.  Wireless networking hid its arcane files and drivers behind a simple window asking for a password.  Things started to just work.  All of that brings me to today, when I have less of a reason to use Linux at home, but I keep using it because I have little reason not to.  That, and because the first thing Vista did on my laptop was reletter the drives and crash.  So throw what you know.

I’ve been through a handful of different distributions over this decade, one of which I was partly responsible for making myself, and I last settled on Fedora because I had hoped it would be the most feature-rich and well-supported option.  It hasn’t worked very well.  Part of Fedora’s semiannual release schedule is an expectation for at-least annual upgrades, but lately every upgrade has, in some way, made things worse.  Pulseaudio and NetworkManager are two changes that, at least at first, were desultory in their integration, seemingly appearing as change for the sake of change, but it’s not only an eagerness to adopt all of the upstream developer’s new problems that repels Fedora from its potential.  There are some serious issues in the underlying management of the Fedora Project.

Fedora Release Engineering does not understand the word “release”

I upgraded to Fedora 11 on June 9th, not forty-eight hours after the release hit the mirrors.  The first thing it did after booting was install 178 new updates.  Every release is a new moving target.  There usually aren’t any major upgrades within a release, but packagers get around this by pushing in pre-release versions of software slated to come out in less than six months.  Both Thunderbird and Mozilla were beta versions, not yet stable enough for the Mozilla developers to be confident but apparently good enough for Fedora.

Whether anything works or not from day to day is reduced to a game of chance.  With Fedora 11 I couldn’t use an external monitor anymore.  Suspend to memory, which didn’t work right in 10, worked at first, and then after another batch of updates it didn’t.  Usability changed from day to day as new versions were marked as important security updates and as I kept installing every new package in the hopes that some of the broken features would finally start to work.  It feels like the only difference between Rawhide, the development branch where every half-thought software commit becomes a new set of updates, and an actual release is that the release will stop updating itself after a year or so.

The desktop team is not doing their job

The people in charge of creating Fedora’s desktop environment do a good job of building and packaging the upstream software, which I admit is no mean task, but they do a really crappy job of creating a consistent user experience.  Take burning a CD for instance.  It used to be that you popped in a blank CD, a new window would pop up that you could drag some things into, and then you hit a button and a CD happened.  That was pretty nice.  If the auto-load feature didn’t work for whatever reason—maybe you’re burning to a CD-RW that already has data on it—there was a “CD/DVD Creator” in the Applications menu that took care of things for you.  In all everything was pretty simple and straightforward.  After a while the CD/DVD Creator moved from Applications to Places.  And then something called Brasero would pop up sometimes, and sometimes it would work and sometimes not.  Whichever program popped up first stopped being able to blank a CD before writing, so you had to do that separately.  Sometimes the CD would eject when it was done, sometimes not.  It was still better than trying to remember the litany of options to pass to cdrecord on the command-line, but it was inconsistent for no reason.

There’s no attention to detail, and the details will flit from place to place depending on the release or the whims of the packager.  Sometimes programs are given an opaque name, sometimes described by what they do, sometimes both.  It’s easy to blame upstream changes on changes in the packaged result, but Fedora is supposed to be there to mediate and interpret the whims of GNOME and Freedesktop and everyone else.  Even if things stay consistent within a particular Fedora release, six months is an awfully short time to be allowed to remember where everything is.

Testing doesn’t seem to test very much

I know that it’s impossible to test everything, but the things I’ve noticed especially wrong seem really obvious.  Switching to an external monitor consistently fails.  When I return from suspend, the laptop immediately suspends itself again.  Changing the volume causes the currently playing sound to skip.  Maximizing firefox causes it to cram itself into the upper-left corner of the screen, and notifications from thunderbird or firefox, which are aiming for the bottom-right corner, appear in the middle of the screen.  I’m not using any particularly weird hardware: it’s just a Lenovo laptop with the integrated Intel chipsets for everything, the same kind of hardware that’s been on every Intel board since the early aughts.  It’s a pretty common case, and one with a reputation for having excellent Linux support, but it sucks at running Fedora.  Maybe a six-month cycle is too short?  I don’t know, but it’d be nice to have something a little more polished.

I’d really like to use Fedora.  It seems to have the most sane attitude among the various distributions around today.  But I’d like more to use something that works.  I hope that someday Fedora does.

Your friend,
David