The Spherical Cow lands, spits out Anaconda

The Fedora project is apparently trying to attract new users. I don't know how they are going to do there but they have really screwed up experienced users like me. The installer is a horrible mess if you want to control partitioning and bootloader placement. It is so bad I have only put 18 on a test box (painfully) to see if they can clean up the mess they have made. I won't use it for anything else until they fix it; like as an operating system. It was painful because I had to rearrange partitions on a test disk to even get it to install. That is a first. The basic problem is the installer won't let you get to existing disk partitions to reformat or install the bootloader into the partition boot record. Until that happens Fedora and I are history. This is from someone who has installed and used every Red Hat/Fedora release since something like Red Hat release 4.2 in the mid 1990's. If the project doesn't fix this mess they are going loose a lot of users including me.

Re: "If the project doesn't fix this mess they are going loose a lot of users including me." Been using Fedora since RedHat too, and although I also use other distros, I'll always probably keep Fedora/RedHat(CentOS,SL) on the computers I run, simply because I revel in the fimiliarity, functionality and support.

@AmyT

I will continue to use other RH based distributions too. I use Scientific Linux 6.3 (RHEL 6.3 clone) in a number of our production machines plus Fedora 16 + 17. The problem with 18 is the installer, not the rest of the distribution. My point with Fedora 18 is that until they fix the installer 18 isn't going anywhere in my shop but that test box. I believe they will fix it, but it will take until at least Fedora 19 to get there. Meanwhile Fedora 18 stays on the test box. So I am not a user of fedora 18.

I have to say the new installer is quite strange. I am sure they will get it sorted out before RHEL adopts it for RHEL 7, but as it stands right now I can't imagine it working for a sysadmin.