How I hate Red Hat Linux 9.0

[giza]

Let me count the ways I'm irritated at Red Hat Linux 9.0...

- No MP3 support. If you try to load an MP3 from XMMS, you get an error about how there are patent issues or whatever over MP3 technology, so MP3 support is no longer included with RedHat. Brilliant move, guys. You just alienated the desktop market.

- Apache is not included. An RPM of Apache would have been nice, but nooooo, you decided to have that only in your "enterprise software". You just alienated the server market.

- Dog slow. X Windows, or the window manager, Metacity, are DOG slow. My P3-450 with 320 Megs of RAM frequently has a load near 1.00. There are really stupid features, like the "let's update the window contents while resizing it" that I don't care for, and I can NOT turn them off! This is just plain retarded. Maybe I can install Sawfish instead...


I've heard good things about Gentoo and SuSE. I think I'll be giving them a try in the near future. Red Hat can bite me.

Comments

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Lo, how the mighty have fallen...

[ex-tjcoyote516.livejournal.com]

Acutal letter, dug out of my email archives:

September 5, 2002.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Allow me to a take a few minutes to relay my experiences with Red Hat Linux 7.3 Professional.

I purchased Red Hat Linux 7.3 Professional a few months ago, intending to use it for a hobby-type web and database server.

I had a bunch of 45gig IBM GXP75 drived pulled from other computers, so I decided to set up two of them as a mirror RAID array with a Promise FastTrack 100 card I had. Bad idea -- that wasn't supported under RedHat Linux.

So I borrowed a generic IDE/100 controller from a friend, and attempted to set up software RAID on that. It didn't work either.

Desperately, I switched back to system's onboard controller, and eventually got software RAID to work on that after many false attempts. But then the system's hard drives were thrashing around constantly. And the system's performance was awful!

Frustrated, I finally wiped Red Hat Linux off the system and set it up to run Apache, MySQL, PHP ... and Windows 2000 Professional.

I strongly prefer Unix-like systems for webserver use, as they are often more reliable and more secure than the alternative. And I do like the fact that I can purchase a package from a company that has tested, evaluated it, and will provide updates, as Red Hat does.

I hope that at some point in the future Red Hat Linux will be an appopriate choice for me. That time just isn't here yet.

I want my $199 back. Please contact me concerning this.

Sincerely,
T----- J. -------

[pantsmanticore.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about Gentoo and SuSE. I think I'll be giving them a try in the near future. Red Hat can bite me.

Why isn't Mandrake on your list? I tried installing a SuSE LiveEval disk on my ancient Gateway laptop and it actually hung during the installer. Bah! I threw it out the window in disgust. Mandrake works like a dream on it. The only problem I'm having with it is figuring out how to get the soundcard detected, which is a fairly minor issue, considering that it's a wierd hand-me down machine that I only use for miscelaneous crap. (Like playing Mah Jong)

Big bloated OSen are all the same.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

The lack of MP3 is inexcusable. Geez, Lame is still cool as far as legal stuff goes, last time I checked.

The lack of Apache... well, they are pushing DeadRat 9 as a desktop OS, and having apache installed unknowingly on a desktop box is kind of a security hole. I guess the figure if you want it, you'll go get it. Even XP Pro doesn't have it's version of IIS "lite" installed by default

As for the lack of performace... well, what can I say? You jumped from 6.1 to 9.0

That's like taking a Win98-era machine and loading XP on it.

Yeah, I'm a windows (and kinda Mac) fan, but all modern OSen scale similarly (one of the fundamental truths that marketroids don't like to admit, Mac OS X has similar issues with older hardware) and I can tell you a P3-450/320MB would be more than enough for Win98 but just as laggy under Windows XP.

You probably don't need me to give you this bit of UI, but if most of your slowness is with X, your biggest bottleneck might be your video card, not your processor.

It is kind of silly you can't turn off all the the chrome on the windows manager. Even XP lets you trim it down to what is essentially the lightweight Win2k GUI.

Re: Big bloated OSen are all the same.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

As for the lack of performace... well, what can I say? You jumped from 6.1 to 9.0

That's like taking a Win98-era machine and loading XP on it.

The difference being, of course, that in the *nix world doing the same tasks with a later version of the OS instead of an earlier one isn't supposed to have a performance hit associated with it. I've seen people pare down relatively recent versions of Slackware to run on machines with 16 megs of RAM (and presumably processors of a similar vintage). That's roughly analogous to your XP example.

You can bog down any system by loading Enlightenment [extra-pretty desktop manager] with all of the goodies enabled, but you shouldn't _have_ to (and don't have to, with sane distributions).

So, I'm afraid I respectfully disagree with your performance comment.

-Deuce

Re: Big bloated OSen are all the same.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Doing the same tasks with XP and 98 require the same CPU power. But the tasks of, say opening a window in the GUI isn't the same at all. It's all the other stuff the OS has running in the background, the overhead of the GUI, etc., that leaves less cycles for user apps and makes the OS appear slower.

When in comes down to the pure CPU benchmarks, Microsoft OSen scale pretty well, even getting a bit of a boost from 9x to 2k based kernels.

Re: Big bloated OSen are all the same.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Doing the same tasks with XP and 98 require the same CPU power. But the tasks of, say opening a window in the GUI isn't the same at all. It's all the other stuff the OS has running in the background, the overhead of the GUI, etc., that leaves less cycles for user apps and makes the OS appear slower.

Then I find your comments even more puzzling, because unlike Windows, Linux (and *bsd, yadda yadda) explicitly decouples the window manager from the rest of the OS. You only pay for eye candy if you explicitly choose to use it. Saying that it's an inevitable part of upgrading to more recent versions of the OS (per your earlier comment) is just silly.

I'm still using fvwm2, and I'm sure twm is buried in here somewhere as well. Hard to get lighter than that. The widget libraries all run on top of X, so they should be WM-agnostic.

Re: Big bloated OSen are all the same.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

I didn't think my comments were all that puzzling. Giza was complaining RH 9 was dog-slow in the GUI with the default settings on his machine.

RH 9 is probably just as lightweight as 6 if you don't care about X or the vast difference in the X-based apps between the two versions.

More than anything, I was referring to the kinds of loads a modern GUI puts on 5 year old hardware.

[khakiwolf.livejournal.com]

I heard a LOT of people hated Red Hat 9.0, for whatever reason. Most of them simply went back to using 8.0, which apparently is MUCH better.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Trust me as a Gentoo user, you probably don't want run Gentoo on a P3-450. Compiling everything gets old really fast. If you've got a few boxes lying around that you can link together for distributed compiling, though, then all is fine.

Gentoo does have a lot of nice sides: most notably, it's the distro where handling the cruft (bits of old stuff that remain there undeleted long after you no longer need it) and keeping it to a minimum, has been easiest for me. It doesn't have packages, only 'recipes' that explain how to install a given piece of software, based on what it depends on and all. This makes it very easy to make your own recipes for software not yet in the official Gentoo tree. And to remove it cleanly afterwards.

The centralised compile-time options are a really nice thing too. Let's say you're using a somewhat slow machine, and you are tired of seeing, say, dependancies on GNOME clog things up continuously. Well you can tell your Gentoo to forbid compiling against GNOME anywhere it's optional. This is really useful.

Still. If you want a distro that Just Works, maybe you'll be just be happier with SuSE. :)

[pantsmanticore.livejournal.com]

FUCK SUSE IN ITS SUSE EAR

[ebdain.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I have information on how to "fix" MP3 support in RH 9.

Personally, I'd suggest Mandrake for the system you have. I didn't like SuSe much when I ran it, and compiling all the parts of Gentoo on that PC will take a long time. I'm running Gentoo 2004.0 now, and liking it alot but it took me ~1 week to compile the whole damn thing on an Athlon 1300. I was running Mandrake 9.2 before, and found it to be a very nice distro.

Mega Man 2 is the best video game ever made.

[pantsmanticore.livejournal.com]

You, Sir, may refer to me as "Daddy" for the next eight hours, or until I sober up. Whichever comes first.

[thraxarious.livejournal.com]

I learned long ago that Redhat was akin to a Toy Linux Kernel. While back, it was nifty in that things were a bit more centralized, but... there were a lot of configuration type holes you could fall into. After leaving them, I wandered around some on OS's...

I personally have found that Debian is a very nice server system for linux. packages and dependancies are generally well tended. There was only one issue a while back with PHP that had package lines broken, but... in general its pretty neat and tidy.

I've been toying with different linux solutions for a bit, trying to find one that works. Debian works very well for me.


Redhat... well.. has sucked for a long time.

[indeterminist.livejournal.com]

Apologies for opening an old entry, but I have an untreatable twitch reflex any time I stumble upon a discussion of this subject. If a decision has already been made, feel free to disregard this, and as with all unsolicited advice it should be taken with a grain of salt either way.

If you find a little spare time with nothing to do, it would probably be worthwhile to look in to Debian (http://www.debian.org). It can be downloaded free, practically anything imaginable is already packaged, all packages come with (I can't emphasize this enough) sane defaults, and apt is niceness incarnate. apt-get install packagename and poof, it's downloaded and properly set up. I've been using it from 486SX/25 with 8mb RAM five or six years ago to my setup today and have yet to be disappointed.