I just finished installed Red Hat 8.0 on my main development machine.
The installation has managed to completely destroy the desktop configuration I've spent 5 years refining to my tastes. It took the liberty of switching my window manager, and is not giving me a clear means of switching it back. There are Windows-like "Home" and "Trash" icons in the upper-left corner that I cannot (easily) get rid of. The asclock application, my timepiece of choice, is not available. None of my TTF fonts, which Xfs is configured to find, are available.
I attempted to set up programs to be run at session start. xmodmap, which I use to re-map some keys. ssh-add, since I run my session under ssh-agent. gkrellm. When I re-did all of this (and why is it that this oh-so-spiffy desktop couldn't import that?), it hung the start-up sequence, forcing me to kill it from a different virtual terminal.
In short, Red Hat has succeeded in bringing the Linux desktop up to speed with Microsoft. I have had almost all choice taken away. I have never before today been so glad I no longer work for these people. DO NOT UPGRADE, unless you want your environment spoon-fed to you by people professing to know what's best for you.
Re:Switch stories
Dom2 on 2002-11-01T13:30:08
There are lots of problems with RedHat 8.0, but that's what you get with a.0 release. I'm running it and I mostly like it, but I don't run GNOME or KDE. If you're a gnome user, you'll probably like it. For me, the best and the worst thing is that they've tried to switch to UTF-8 wherever possible. I'm immensely happy that somebody has finally had the balls to do this, but I'm unhappy about the number of programs that just aren't quite there yet. Like man pages being wrong sometimes.
On the whole, I think it's pretty good, but I'd wait for RH81 if you're nervous about new features.
-Dom
