Red Hat Slips off a Curve (OfB.biz) [LWN.net]

Timothy R. Butler continues the Penguin Shootout with a look at Red Hat 8.0. He is not entirely pleased with the results. "Another small issue is the Red Hat Network. Unlike MandrakeSoft or SuSE's update utilities, RHN keeps a profile of your system to decide what updates you need. Besides the fact that Red Hat ends up knowing a lot about your system (you can opt out of giving various information), this also means that Red Hat doesn't allow you to have multiple systems hooked up to RHN without additional fees. While I can certainly understand why, after all, it takes a lot of space to store all of that information, Red Hat could avoid both the problem and the cause by simply having the RHN utility decide on the client side what needs updates rather than on the server side."

to post comments

Red Hat Slips off a Curve (OfB.biz)

Posted Jan 30, 2003 12:27 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (2 responses)

Another thing that was disappointing right off the bat was the fact that Red Hat failed to provide any kind of "graphical" boot process. Much like all GNU/Linux distributions a few years back, Red Hat still sticks to a standard text-based boot messages that look very peculiar to new users. We would like to see the company at least make the process seem a little friendlier with something like SuSE and Mandrake's "bootsplash" which "frames" the messages with a nice logo and possibly a progress bar or animation.

I'm getting old and crotchety.

I see this complaint, and I just shake my head. People are asking for gratuitous cruft.

A progress bar is one thing; of course, LILO's periods includes that. But an animation? Sheesh. Why do you need a graphical boot loader? You see it briefly, once, at boot-up; it's not something you're interacting with in the system all the time.

Unfortunately, the reviewer is probably right. Some people really will judge a system on such superficial and fluffy grounds. Windows users will see LILO or GRUB and think that Linux must be terribly old and unusable, never mind what happens once they get Gnome or KDE and OpenOffice.org all running. It's as with anything else. If you keep your window boxes planted with flowers and your railings nicely painted, passers by are much less likely to ask whether or not your an industrial polluter, even though window boxes and railings have nothing to do with that.

-Rob

Red Hat Slips off a Curve (OfB.biz)

Posted Feb 8, 2003 23:45 UTC (Sat) by lpq (guest, #9526) [Link] (1 responses)

> People are asking for gratuitous cruft.
===
I betcha Henry Ford said the same thing when people wanted automobile painted in colors instead of black.

Darn fluffy market place...what do they know?

(life isn't about what's real or practical: it's about appearances)

Red Hat Slips off a Curve (OfB.biz)

Posted Feb 10, 2003 16:26 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

> (life isn't about what's real or practical: it's about appearances)

And we can all see how productive that's been, and what positive effects it's had on the world, right?