I know some people are going to take this as a troll, though it's not meant to be. It's a constructive criticism of Redhat 8.0. I hope the RH management people are reading this.
I'm a long-term Redhat user, recently defected to Debian. I still have a Redhat installation on one partition, and I've been testing RH 8.0 recently (and I'm using right now to write this). On the one hand, I'll congratulate Redhat on the move to gcc 3.2 and Gnome 2.0 - both are improvements. It's also interesting how Redhat is (finally) getting a handle on package management. And yes, 8.0 seems quite stable. Security and good configuration tools are strong points. BUT, the big issue is the missing apps. It was already a blow to Redhat users when the Powertools CD disappeared in version 7.1. I still have an old Powertools disk, but those rpms (compiled under gcc 2.96) can no longer be used with gcc 3.2. And now, starting from version 8.0, multimedia apps have vanished. Yes, I know some of the politics behind mpg, but the current situation is ridiculous. Also newly vanished are lightweight window managers (FVWM2, IceWM, XFCE, Windowmaker, etc). Rp3 has disappeared, and I don't see any replacement (right now I'm using /sbin/ifup ppp0 to get online). I actually know a few people who tried 8.0 and then went back to 7.3 because they needed the apps. Compared to the competition (Mandrake, SuSE, Debian), Redhat can now claim to have the leanest distro of the bunch. This seems to contradict Redhat's recent push to capture the desktop market. Of course, you can try to repair 8.0 by scouring the Internet for downloads. In most cases, you wind up with source code - sometimes it compiles, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it compiles but the app segfaults when you run it. You need time, good luck and karma to assemble a working system. With all the compiling and downloading I'm doing, I feel as if I'm running Gentoo rather than Redhat. I'm an experienced user, and I'm finding it a struggle - new users must be blown away. OK, I know I'm going to get flamed. That's OK - I'm used to being called an idiot. But before you turn on the flamethrowers, ask yourself if the above isn't true. If Redhat has a secret Powertools disk out there that I'm not aware of, just tell me, and I'll buy it. If I've erred in my reasoning, I'll gladly admit it. I do hope all these problems will be solved in the next release. I'm willing to give 8.1 a try when it comes out - I just hope they don't remove all the Email clients and web browsers from that version. Robert Storey maybe dumb, but not stupid -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
