Another day, another review

This time, it’s Ken Barber’s review ofopinion piece on Fedora Core 2. For Linux.com to publish this sort of drivel, scares me. Most of the useful comments state it all, but something caught me:

It is bleeding-edge technology that will become mainstream in a year or so, and as such is an important distro for people who will be working with next year’s technology.

Sponsored by...

Firewire is borked because the upstream kernel has a borked Firewire; the YaST discussion has come up on fedora-devel-list before (archives!); Fedora “just works” for a lot of people; GNOME 2.6 is not broken. Well, going by popularity, everyone loves Fedora Core, they’re just to shy to say it :)

12 Comments

  1. wahlau says:

    i read this earlier when i was doing my fc1 > fc2 upgrade :) just don’t give a damn on it :) it worked perfectly now on my notebook :)

  2. dopeflish says:

    Well said! Even worse, the slashdot article that pointed to it seemed to only quote the critical parts of the article. Fedora cora does just work for me, and for many others. :)

  3. I just posted my positive Fedora Core 2 review on MadPenguin.org

  4. Link says:

    Its sad that Novell has stooped to marketing articles to undermine other distributions. That’s not in the spirit of free software. Remember the days when we used to help out other distributions, and share software and packaging methods. Now its a market, and an industry, and the business people are moving in fast with their fangs bared to suck as much profit as they can out of us. Sorry if this is to emotional but these kinds of articles really piss me off. Hell I don’t even use FC2!

  5. byte says:

    Link, keep in mind that the site, Linux.com is sponsored by Novell. There’s nothing saying that Novell wrote/sponsored such an article. You’d just expect more from Linux.com, being owned by a reputable company (OSDN), to actually post a review that makes sense… Not one thats incorrect.

  6. Link says:

    Yes, I would expect more. But it does seem extremely suspicious that an article on a site sponsored by Novell makes the same old complaints that we’ve heard thanks to Mr. Petreley. And on top of that, says YaST is good. What purpose does that article serve other than to get people like me all buggered and get those Linux beginners to think that one distribution is actually better than another?

  7. byte says:

    Well, I’m not about to start a conspiracy theory – a lot of the Novell hackers (the Ximian monkeys) do a great job on GNOME/OOo, and I have immense respect for them. As to why YaST gets a mention, beats me, but Novell will also be using GNOME 2.6 in SuSE 9.1, so really, I doubt they’d be bagging it.

  8. Link says:

    I know, I think my kneejerk reaction is starting to wear off. I really respect the Ximian guys too. Its just that these useless articles get under my skin. “If you don’t like it, don’t use it, but don’t complain about it.” One of the cool things about open source; there’s always an alternative.
    I do hope they open up a bit with the development. Everything’s happening rather quietly behind the scenes, and the community’s left out in the cold wondering what happened to X or Y. A rather curious form of open source development if you ask me. But I come from Debian, where everything is logged on lists.debian.org or bugs.debian.org, for all the world to see, so my viewpoint might be skewed.

  9. The review did rather puzzle me. It made FC2 sound completely unusable…

  10. wahlau says:

    it depends how people would believe in *one* article only…

  11. Well Microsoft FUD seems to grip people quite well from only one source.

  12. dopeflish says:

    Well said! Even worse, the slashdot article that pointed to it seemed to only quote the critical parts of the article. Fedora cora does just work for me, and for many others. :)


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