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Other desktop support?Other desktop support?Posted Jan 16, 2013 8:25 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Fedora 18 experience
Our Grumpy Editor seems to have looked at just Gnome and MATE desktops, but as someone who hasn't used Gnome regularly since about 1999 I would have appreciated also some words about how Fedora 18 treats KDE and XFCE. Are they second-class citizens, or a would Fedora be a reasonable choice for their fans?
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Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 8:55 UTC (Wed) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]
KDE is ihmo the best DE Fedora ships, the Fedora KDE team is very active and keeps things current at all times. Recommended.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 9:06 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
Unlike the Debian one which is stuck at an antiquated version sinces months. I had no incentive to test any other distribution, maybe I should try Fedora.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 9:54 UTC (Wed) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]
Wheezy has been frozen for 6 months now. I'm not defending the Debian release policy, I'm just pointing out that KDE is probably not being especially disrespected here: almost everything in Debian is currently several months old.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 10:54 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
In fact, I don't really care for Wheezy. I've been using sid/experimental for as long as I can remember (maybe before 2000, I don't know), I've seen many person trying to explain why a testing freeze implies an unstable freeze but never with convincing arguments.
And unlike most other outdated applications, you don't need to rebuild the package with one or two rdeps, you must build a whole pile of pieces.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:14 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
It's simple: There are more unstable users than testing users. By freezing unstable, the two remain relatively close; so the chance that a user of unstable catches a testing bug is larger.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:27 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
I don't see how that's a good argument. Shouldn't the ones that expressed interest in testing becoming stable (having testing as source) be the ones to test testing ?
And if there is not enough people to test testing, maybe it just means that there is not point in releasing stable (and in freezing testing) ?
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:43 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] You appear to have not-universally-accurate assumptions about why people choose to run testing. For example, I run testing because I want a "buffer" between me and the very latest updates, but equally don't want to be running the antiquated versions of things found in stable.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:53 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
OK, that's why you use testing, that's good enough, I have no problem with that at all.
I have yet to see why this imposes a freeze on unstable, on the other hand.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 18:56 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Because if they only froze testing, all its users would migrate to unstable...
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 17, 2013 7:57 UTC (Thu) by DavidS (subscriber, #84675) [Link]
> I have yet to see why this imposes a freeze on unstable, on the other hand.
Because "unstable" is the place where stuff goes that should be released with the next stable. See Developer Reference 4.6.4.1:
> This development cycle is based on the assumption that the unstable
-- http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/re...
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 17, 2013 8:05 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
I was under the illusion that you could change the developement branch of a project without impacting the other one.
Debian freezes Posted Jan 18, 2013 6:30 UTC (Fri) by DavidS (subscriber, #84675) [Link]
Tl;dr:unstable is not a development branch, it is a integration branch. Experimental might be considered a development one.
Uploading to unstable publishes packages as "destined for stable". In the case of libraries, that also means that users of this library will start linking against the new binary. This again implies that the two packages now must go to testing together. This quickly leads to situations where significant parts of unstable cannot progress to testing due to issues in central packages (think gtk).
Debian freezes Posted Jan 18, 2013 8:06 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
Experimental is not a branch, it's not self contained (you cannot use only experimental, you need to have unstable as well).
> Building new packages against libraries from testing would reduce the formal requirements for testing propagation, but would lead to untested combinations in testing
But I'd prefer that. I still think that those who care about testing should be the ones testing it.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:47 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Can one even install testing in a convenient way? I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it using debootstrap, for example.
It all sounds like yet another cunning plan to second-guess the herd of users and make them do something they don't really want to, instead of making it easy for those who are interested to do something, and encouraging (rather than coercing) others to join them.
As for KDE being the most desirable desktop environment, that's quite a depressing statement on the topic, but not entirely unsurprising given my recent experiences from renewed exposure to KDE 4 (sorry, KDE Plasma), Trinity, GNOME and Unity.
Testing testing Posted Jan 16, 2013 15:15 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
It was a while ago when I last tried, and I did wonder whether I was mixing up experimental and testing in my mind as I try and recall the details now, but I can try again and see if there's any success.
People being able to try out testing would be one fewer reason to freeze unstable, I think.
Testing testing Posted Jan 16, 2013 15:58 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
It's possible that there was a bug in one of the packages that comprised testing at the particular time you installed it, and that may have prevented debootstrap from finishing. Such bugs are pretty rare though--they usually get noticed during the 10 day waiting period between packages entering unstable and transitioning to testing.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 21:06 UTC (Wed) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]
The problem is that direct updates to testing are currently not being tested at all. They are introduced into testing-proposed-updates and nobody has this enabled.
Hence we require updates to flow through unstable. We are not reviewing all what's uploaded to unstable, although many of the uploads there are now voluntarily reviewed to see if they fit the release criteria for migration to testing at this point. Any upload to unstable still ages there, too, just like in non-freeze times. This means that the worst bugs that are introduced by bug fixes are likely to be found by unstable's user base before they hit testing. In turn this makes testing more stable and solid to be used at this point before it's finally released. It also allows some more intrusive RC bug fixes to be accepted under the premise that we'll soon find out if they're flawed.
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 16, 2013 15:18 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]
I'm not very familiar with KDE.
Does it stop working once it's a couple of months old? :)
Other desktop support? Posted Jan 25, 2013 15:07 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
No, why, you saying that happens on GNOME?
LXDE Posted Jan 16, 2013 22:01 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I can say that LXDE is not treated very well. Fedora 17 shipped with broken alacarte, which is the menu editor for GNOME and LXDE. It has not been fixed in Fedora 17, even though the fix is known. Thankfully, Fedora 18 comes with working alacarte, but the maintainers refused to backport the fix.Also, switching keyboard layouts (like English to Russian) broke in Fedora 18. For whatever reason, it still works on a system that was installed as Fedora 17, but not on systems that were upgraded from Fedora 16 to Fedora 17 and then to Fedora 18. There is a way to configure keyboard layout switching in GNOME, but it has no effect in LXDE. What's worse, the is no way to use Alt-Shift, the GNOME configuration requires a non-modifier key (like Space) with modifiers. ibus works in LXDE but has the same limitation. That's a very annoying regression for me. I still need to figure out why one of my systems keeps working properly. Finally, the systems that used lxdm started using gdm after the upgrade. It turns out the configuration files don't work anymore. systemd is now responsible for the display manager. To enable lxdm, I had to run
That wasn't easy to figure out. Unfortunately, systemd makes a lot of knowledge obsolete.
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