[NTLUG:Discuss] any feed back on RH 8.0 yet

[Chris Cox]

Fred James wrote:
> Any feedback on RH 8.0 yet?  Compare to 7.2? Good/bad/indifferent?
> I am on 7.2, and thinking of 8.0, and would appreciate your thoughts.
> 

Apart from the UTF-8 issues... RH 8.0 is giant step forward
for RH.  Personally, I would probably wait for RH 8.1, but
still, it's not bad for a RH .0 release.  Finally, RH's
administration is starting to take shape (instead of the mess
it was in prior).

Issues I've seen...
UTF-8 (incompatibilities with several packages)
i810 setup, sometimes causing kernel panics (disable dri in XF86Config)
Although Bluecurve advertises uniform look and feel, it's still
     VERY obvious that RH prefers Gnome, so your favorite KDE
     programs will be replaced with rough Gnome equivalents (or just
     simply missing WITH no option).
RH hates MP3... many inconsistent messages... probably the most
     'Clintonian' distribution... supports whatever is popular
     even when it seemingly contradicts something else they do.
Gnome bonobo still crashes occasionally taking out the entire
     Bluecurve session (not necessarily a visible occurrence, things
     just stop operating correctly).
SUPATH... RH doesn't understand the concept (ongoing issue with RH).

With that said...

The administration tools are a step in the right direction, but
the granularity of package selection is too high and dependency
management still seems to elude RH.  SuSE still does a much better
job in both of those areas (I am of course a SuSE bigot though).
RH's new administration is similar to where SuSE was back in
the 6.4 days.... but still, anything is a noticeable improvement
for RH.  SuSE 8.1 isn't perfect either... though noticeably
better than RH 8.0, I'm really looking forward to SuSE 8.2.

RH 8.0 finally recognizes LVM and tries to make it easy
to configure.  That's a big plus as well.

If you are a Gnome fan... RH probably does it best among
the not-completely-free distributions.