Fedora 19 Schrödinger’s Cat Review – Back in the box

The Fedora 18 installer was basically unusable. The Fedora 19 installer isn't quite as bad. This is from someone who has been using RedHat and then Fedora distros since the middle 1990s. That is too bad. Once one gets through the installer mess they get a pretty nice distro. It is the usual bleeding edge Fedora installation that somehow manages to be rock solid stable. Now if they can only get the installer right. Meanwhile I will stick to Scientific Linux as my main distro.

I was able to suffer through the F18 installer. I didn't do anything too complicated, and it was still a pain, but you could get it done.

Folks often sneer at me when I say I'm using Slackware for everything server- and desktop-related. "Why don't you use a modern distribution ?!? SELinux yadda yadda, Systemd yadda yadda?!?"

Well, how about some basic functionality like partitioning?

Fortunately or not, LVM made things harder, and now EFI is making them even harder still. If you don't want to use either of those features, things are much easier. And don't get me started on encryption. One of the best things about the Anaconda installer -- both the new and old -- is the ability for a mortal human to set up any number of encrypted partitions with a single passphrase and not requiring all partitions to be encrypted, or there being only a single OS on the disk.

@kikinovak: Not sure where you're going there. The partitioning step is still separate from the Slackware installer, unless I'm missing something.

gus3: and that's exactly my point. As a sysadmin, I want some reliable tools like fdisk, gdisk or cfdisk for partitioning. They're not "part" of the Slackware installer, but they're available, and that's it. Not some graphical nightmare that makes me jump through burning loops for even the simplest operation. Keep It Simple Stupid, as they say.

In my pre-LVM days, I would partition in a live CD with gparted, then do my install. If/when gparted handles LVM and EFI. (and if that has already happened, I don't know about it).