<p dir="ltr">Chuck et al,</p>
<p dir="ltr">As a l o n g time red hat then fedora user, I thought the new installer in fedora 18 was bad implementation of a decent but unpolished idea. <br>
I think philosophically the idea is to make it so a total newbie could get a working install. But it was done at the expense of all the experienced users. <br>
The partitioning tool is nearly useless. It allows ZERO control over mdraid partitions. It's really only useful for making a simple desktop.<br>
The package selection is crippled as well. Again simplicity trumps functionality. <br>
I suspect RHEL will fork anaconda out of need.<br>
Kickstart is a great tool but it's for very advanced users not just average users or even many pro admins will find it in their bag of tricks. Add to it the commands change a bit with every release and it's a recipe for rollout headaches. And it's got bugs. The command clearpart --all doesn't support the --ondisk= flag so it only wipes sda. That fails for a 4 disk box being repurposed! I had to manually zero out partition tables on all drives before pxe booting kickstart of F19. And the current anaconda only understands raid 1 with 2 partitions. A 3 or 4 will lock it up (spits dots on the screen and hangs).</p>
<p dir="ltr"> Sadly, it looks like Fedora is taking the path of decreasing flexibility to increase ease of use without providing a means to support the familiar extensive customizations. If it's an attempt to gain users by lowering the bar for user skill, I strongly disagree. Winders and sMac are perfect for the clueless masses. I don't want throngs of mentally lazy newbies using sophisticated and dangerously powerful tools like Linux. Granted, Fedora ships with all services off and selinux on full enforcing so it's quite secure. But for noobs, that security is hidden from view and thus more computer magic.<br>
</rant></p>