I share some of the frustration with Fedora developers "not listening" but I don't share all of the frustration. As far as customizing CentOS / Fedora for server vs desktop vs laptop vs whatever, to me that is a moot issue. In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image. Set up the image how you want and be done with it, you can then deploy it thousands of times and it is set up the way you need it. I typically use the default image provided by Linode - it is a good image for a server, just remember to install the yum-cron package and enable the firewall. I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue with it. Yes it is different than what I learned, but once I stopped yelling at the kids to get off my damn lawn, it wasn't that hard to figure out what I needed to do to get systemd to work for me instead of me working against it. Gnome is the only place where I have serious issue with the direction Fedora is going. I loved Gnome 2 but hate Gnome 3 with a passion. I tried to love it, but I just can't. They took away my vertical scroll bars. I understand most people scroll with a mouse wheel, but it is really hard to do that from my T series thinkpads. The solution they gave me in the forums involved needing to write some CSS stuff - no gui checkbox, I had to create a CSS file. And even that didn't fully work, some applications still didn't have scroll bars. Apparently that's because they weren't "ported" to the newer gtk or something. But if that's the case, where adding the CSS won't bring the scroll thing back, then they shouldn't lose it. Fonts - they look horrible to me in Gnome 3 and no setting I could figure out made them look good. Graphics - moving stuff around the desktop really taxed my built-in video, what use to be smooth was often choppy, especially on my Thinkpad T410. Totem - for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get it to not be full screen. Switched to mate and all those issues instantly went away. Gnome3 I think is an area where the Fedora developers are refusing to listen, but that isn't really an issue because they do package Mate and Mate is in EPEL so I can install it in CentOS and be done with it. But things like systemd, wireless drivers, etc. - there, I don't think there is a good argument because it is easy to set up a system and make an image that you then use as your base for creating new VMs for the server. As someone who uses CentOS on the desktop quite a bit, I am glad that RHEL / CentOS does pay attention to the needs of use desktop users. I use to use CentOS on the server and Fedora on the desktop, and then, RHEL/CentOS as a server OS made sense to me. But Fedora is too bleeding edge for my liking now, and CentOS is the Linux distribution I recommend for desktop use. So no, I don't think it should target servers at the expense of the desktop users. Just my two cents, don't mean to stir the pot, just giving my opinion.
Op 12-dec.-2015 15:03 schreef Alice Wonder <alice at domblogger.net>:> > I share some of the frustration with Fedora developers "not listening" > but I don't share all of the frustration. > > As far as customizing CentOS / Fedora for server vs desktop vs laptop vs > whatever, to me that is a moot issue. > > In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual > machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image. Set up the > image how you want and be done with it, you can then deploy it thousands > of times and it is set up the way you need it. > > I typically use the default image provided by Linode - it is a good > image for a server, just remember to install the yum-cron package and > enable the firewall. > > I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue > with it. Yes it is different than what I learned, but once I stopped > yelling at the kids to get off my damn lawn, it wasn't that hard to > figure out what I needed to do to get systemd to work for me instead of > me working against it. > > Gnome is the only place where I have serious issue with the direction > Fedora is going. I loved Gnome 2 but hate Gnome 3 with a passion. I > tried to love it, but I just can't. > > They took away my vertical scroll bars. I understand most people scroll > with a mouse wheel, but it is really hard to do that from my T series > thinkpads. > > The solution they gave me in the forums involved needing to write some > CSS stuff - no gui checkbox, I had to create a CSS file. > > And even that didn't fully work, some applications still didn't have > scroll bars. Apparently that's because they weren't "ported" to the > newer gtk or something. But if that's the case, where adding the CSS > won't bring the scroll thing back, then they shouldn't lose it. > > Fonts - they look horrible to me in Gnome 3 and no setting I could > figure out made them look good. > > Graphics - moving stuff around the desktop really taxed my built-in > video, what use to be smooth was often choppy, especially on my Thinkpad > T410. > > Totem - for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get it to not be > full screen. > > Switched to mate and all those issues instantly went away. > > Gnome3 I think is an area where the Fedora developers are refusing to > listen, but that isn't really an issue because they do package Mate and > Mate is in EPEL so I can install it in CentOS and be done with it. > > But things like systemd, wireless drivers, etc. - there, I don't think > there is a good argument because it is easy to set up a system and make > an image that you then use as your base for creating new VMs for the server. > > As someone who uses CentOS on the desktop quite a bit, I am glad that > RHEL / CentOS does pay attention to the needs of use desktop users. > > I use to use CentOS on the server and Fedora on the desktop, and then, > RHEL/CentOS as a server OS made sense to me. > > But Fedora is too bleeding edge for my liking now, and CentOS is the > Linux distribution I recommend for desktop use. > > So no, I don't think it should target servers at the expense of the > desktop users. > > Just my two cents, don't mean to stir the pot, just giving my opinion.Having 150 people using CentOS on the desktop, I couldn't agree more Greetings, J. _______________________________________________> CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Dec 12, 2015, at 7:03 AM, Alice Wonder <alice at domblogger.net> wrote:> > In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual machineI think you?re committing the same kind of error here that Fedora is: assuming your ?typical? use case is typical of the wider world. We do use a lot of VMs here, but they?re far outnumbered by the number of bare-metal installations. You?re describing the appliance model, which is a fine and valid use of CentOS, but hardly the only one. One of the big recent trends in the virtualization space is containerization (e.g. Docker, BSD jails, Solaris zones?) where there may be little to no ?OS? inside the container. Its growth is partly at the expense of the old ?full OS inside a VM? model of virtualization. Like most displaced tech, I don?t expect heavyweight VMs to ever disappear, but the tech might be slowly marginalized. General purpose OSes remain useful in a world of increasing appliance VMs, embedded OSes, cloud services, and mobile OSes because you can use them as the base for anything a computer can do. Where once upon a time, GP OSes were the only thing available, they remain useful to handle all the weird edge-case things that aren?t covered by the existing cookie-cutter cases. That has a practical consequence, though: you can?t predict, a priori, how someone will use a GP OS. ?Streamlining? it amounts to putting barriers up on many of those edge case paths. Instead of trying to make CentOS simpler to use for a predetermined task set, I?d rather they made it simpler to access all of its power, and leave it to *me* to decide what the tasks are. That means not hiding functionality behind task-focused interfaces, because my tasks are not your tasks. I gave one example of a case where EL7 is now harder for us to use than earlier versions in the other thread. (The ?NM swaps static and IP interfaces? problem.) Let me give another here: In EL5 on a single-NIC machine, it was possible to set it up for a static IP, then create an ifcfg-eth0:0 file with a DHCP configuration, so that the interface would also get an IP alias, DNS info, and a default route from the DHCP server. You can?t do that in EL7 any more because NetworkManager only knows about static IP aliases. It knows nothing about alias interfaces, which are a much more powerful concept. In the end, I had to configure enp3s0 as DHCP, then hack in a static IP alias with an ifconfig call in rc.local. I?ll forgive you if that solution makes you nearly puke, because it did that to me, too. In case you?re thinking about the previous complaint, yes, this is the single-NIC version of the same problem, but with a different consequence, which is suspect all by itself. Why is there a behavior difference between static+DHCP in the dual-NIC and alias interface cases? The whole idea of alias interfaces is that they act like independent NICs that just happen to share the same physical medium as their parent NIC. Answer: Because NM doesn?t know what alias interfaces *are*. Instead of adding the ability to create alias interfaces to the NM GUI/TUI, they just added a field that lets you list additional static IP aliases, which captures part of the *function* of the previous mechanism while missing out on much of its full power. They made it task-focused for a task that does not need doing in my world. It?s like giving a mop to the owner of a fully-carpeted home. I characterize this as an EL7 issue because there were fewer consequences to disabling NM in EL6. Here in EL7, things break if you disable NM, so that they?re basically forcing you to use it, even though it doesn?t do everything the old scheme could yet.> I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue with it.I remain ambivalent about systemd. I?m with you insofar as I recognize that systemd serves a useful purpose, and it is mostly fit for that purpose. Pretty much everything you could do on a pre-systemd box, you can do under systemd, too. systemd provides real value to CentOS. The biggest problem I have with it is its monopolization of system functionality. The most commonly cited example of this I see is that systemd now owns logging. Never mind the whole binary logging problem, why does a process launcher own logging in the first place? What was wrong with syslogd? You know, the Unix philosophy and all? Small pieces, loosely joined? Why aren?t we dancing with the one who brought us to the dance any more? But it goes much further than that, with more serious consequences. For example, systemd has usurped udev and dbus, which are key parts of the freedesktop.org standards, which allow GNOME, KDE, and other *ix desktop environments to interoperate. But that in turn means that non-systemd based OSes that want to ship FreeDesktop-compatible DEs like GNOME and KDE must now include systemd. FreeBSD doesn?t *want* systemd. This feels an awful lot like ?embrace, extend, and extinguish.?[1] I sure hope Red Hat isn?t the new Microsoft. If you want to see what systemd *could* have looked like, take a look at launchd.[2] There?s talk in the BSD world of using it instead of systemd, though that may not be practical given the FreeDesktop standards problem. By the way, what NIH process went on in North Carolina that led them to reject the Apache-licensed launchd, available 5 years prior to the creation of systemd, and used in a production capacity that whole time? Or upstart, created 4 years prior for Ubuntu? This is what I mean about EEE: systemd is derailing other OSes? development processes. I understand the ambivalence toward the use of XML in launchd, and there are Mac-isms in launchd, but those are both easier problems to solve than creating systemd from scratch. So much easier, in fact, that it?s been solved multiple times.[3][4] The inverse of that sort of effort ? ?fixing? systemd to make it suitable for non-Linux OSes ? seems to be too difficult to bother with.[5] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd [3]: https://github.com/mheily/relaunchd [4]: http://www.nextbsd.org/clarifying-near-term-expectations/ [5]: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/> Gnome is the only place where I have serious issue with the direction Fedora is going. I loved Gnome 2 but hate Gnome 3 with a passion. I tried to love it, but I just can?t.What is this GNOME thing you speak of? Is it part of ssh? :)> But Fedora is too bleeding edge for my liking now, and CentOS is the Linux distribution I recommend for desktop use.Why? Bleeding-edge Linuxes work best in places where there are hands on the box constantly, so you can cope with the blood loss, so to speak. In such an environment, the benefits outweigh the costs. Contrast a stable Linux use case, where it?s mainly important that the provided packages be reasonably up-to-date at the time of development and deployment. Once you?ve got an unattended server up and running, it is rare to need newer package versions on it; you just need security patches and bugfixes, the very thing that a stable OS provides. Newer services typically get deployed on new servers, not on the one that?s been running for 5 years, and is now 2 major OS versions behind.
Alice Wonder wrote:> In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual > machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image. Set up the > image how you want and be done with it, you can then deploy it thousands > of times and it is set up the way you need it.Who is "you"? I'm running a home server under CentOS-7, and I'm not using a virtual machine. Why should I? I don't want to "deploy it thousands of times". It's amazing how people assume that everyone in the world is, or should be, running things in the same way as themselves.> I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue > with it. Yes it is different than what I learned,I dislike systemd because it is much more complicated than its predecessor, and it has no advantages in my case to make up for this. The main advantage that was originally claimed was that it boots faster. That is not the case on my Fedora laptop. It is no faster, and it is much harder to work out what is happening if something goes wrong. -- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
On 12/13/2015 04:19 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:> Alice Wonder wrote: > >> In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual >> machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image. Set up the >> image how you want and be done with it, you can then deploy it thousands >> of times and it is set up the way you need it. > > Who is "you"? > I'm running a home server under CentOS-7, > and I'm not using a virtual machine. > Why should I? > I don't want to "deploy it thousands of times".You is an author's you, kind of like author's we. I understand author's you and we are going out of style, but they are very much ingrained within me. I mean the typical server and indicated a server environment opposed to a home environment.> > It's amazing how people assume that everyone in the world > is, or should be, running things in the same way as themselves. > >> I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue >> with it. Yes it is different than what I learned, > > I dislike systemd because it is much more complicated than its predecessor, > and it has no advantages in my case to make up for this. > The main advantage that was originally claimed was that it boots faster. > That is not the case on my Fedora laptop. > It is no faster, and it is much harder to work out what is happening > if something goes wrong. >It's not speed that matters to me, and I would be fine with System V init. However it seemed at the end of the day, most of the arguments against systemd boiled down to "we've never done it that way before" or "It's not the UNIX way" rather than actual technical reasons why System V should be used and systemd rejected. One of the benefits of systemd is the dependency based parallel startup. The same speed can often be achieved with system V init by fine tuning when the services start but systemd does that automatically. Speed though doesn't concern me. I almost never reboot my servers or my desktop or laptop (I do sleep the laptop but only reboot after kernel update) Especially with SSDs, boot time isn't an argument for systemd - and I do not want to convince anyone that it is better. Just that it is not difficult to use, there are some advantages - how valuable those advantages are depend upon what you do (author's you again, not personal you) but it seems that these advantages have since been seen by just about every Linux distro that has any significant market share. Popular doesn't make it right, but it did make me rethink my objections to it and whether or not those objections were rational. For me, I decided that no, they weren't rational.
On 12/12/2015 08:03 AM, Alice Wonder wrote:> I share some of the frustration with Fedora developers "not listening" > but I don't share all of the frustration. > > As far as customizing CentOS / Fedora for server vs desktop vs laptop vs > whatever, to me that is a moot issue. > > In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual > machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image. Set up the > image how you want and be done with it, you can then deploy it thousands > of times and it is set up the way you need it. > > I typically use the default image provided by Linode - it is a good > image for a server, just remember to install the yum-cron package and > enable the firewall. > > I was one of the systemd haters initially but now I don't have an issue > with it. Yes it is different than what I learned, but once I stopped > yelling at the kids to get off my damn lawn, it wasn't that hard to > figure out what I needed to do to get systemd to work for me instead of > me working against it. > > Gnome is the only place where I have serious issue with the direction > Fedora is going. I loved Gnome 2 but hate Gnome 3 with a passion. I > tried to love it, but I just can't. > > They took away my vertical scroll bars. I understand most people scroll > with a mouse wheel, but it is really hard to do that from my T series > thinkpads. > > The solution they gave me in the forums involved needing to write some > CSS stuff - no gui checkbox, I had to create a CSS file. > > And even that didn't fully work, some applications still didn't have > scroll bars. Apparently that's because they weren't "ported" to the > newer gtk or something. But if that's the case, where adding the CSS > won't bring the scroll thing back, then they shouldn't lose it. > > Fonts - they look horrible to me in Gnome 3 and no setting I could > figure out made them look good. > > Graphics - moving stuff around the desktop really taxed my built-in > video, what use to be smooth was often choppy, especially on my Thinkpad > T410. > > Totem - for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get it to not be > full screen. > > Switched to mate and all those issues instantly went away. > > Gnome3 I think is an area where the Fedora developers are refusing to > listen, but that isn't really an issue because they do package Mate and > Mate is in EPEL so I can install it in CentOS and be done with it. > > But things like systemd, wireless drivers, etc. - there, I don't think > there is a good argument because it is easy to set up a system and make > an image that you then use as your base for creating new VMs for the > server. > > As someone who uses CentOS on the desktop quite a bit, I am glad that > RHEL / CentOS does pay attention to the needs of use desktop users. > > I use to use CentOS on the server and Fedora on the desktop, and then, > RHEL/CentOS as a server OS made sense to me. > > But Fedora is too bleeding edge for my liking now, and CentOS is the > Linux distribution I recommend for desktop use. > > So no, I don't think it should target servers at the expense of the > desktop users. > > Just my two cents, don't mean to stir the pot, just giving my opinion.Just for the record, CentOS doesn't make these kinds of decisions .. we rebuild whatever Red Hat releases for soruce code for RHEL. You will notice, if you used the CR tree, that the new desktop for 7.1511 (based on the 7.2 RHEL source code), is a much newer version of Gnome and KDE. Gnome is now 3.14.x, it was 3.8.x. KDELibs are now 4.14.x, the were 4.10.x. So, CentOS does not make and decisions about usability or anything else, we simply build released source code when it is released .. nothinh more, nothing less. (For our core repos) We do have special intrenet groups, and those can focus on and even change some areas. For example, if the community is willing to do the work, they can ask for and form a Desktop SIG and add items to the desktop. But I wanted to make sure people did understand that we are not making content decisions for the core CentOS repos. Thanks, Johnny Hughes -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20151213/a281e573/attachment-0001.sig>
Alice Wonder wrote:> As far as customizing CentOS / Fedora for server vs desktop vs laptop vs > whatever, to me that is a moot issue.> In the server environment you almost certainly are using a virtual > machine, and to use a virtual machine you create an image.What precisely do you mean by "the server environment"? I run a number of home servers on HP MicroServers. Evidently this is not a "server environment" in your view. The only sense I can give to your phrase is "a system run by one or more paid sysadmins". -- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin