101 things I hate about Fedora

My server died last night... well, the OS drive died. Data drives are okay, and I've been way overdue for an OS upgrade for a while (Fedora Core 5 isn't current?? what?) so I wasn't too upset. Good opportunity to get migrated up to the current version, Fedora Core 9. Before anyone says "why didn't you use distro xyz"... I work with RedHat systems, and I've got my RHCE, so I'm really familiar with the RedHat-ish OS's. That's why I use Fedora.

However, it ain't perfect, and it has more than its fair share of annoying shit. While I'm sitting here trying to get it back up and running, let me go through some of them. Ok, so it won't be a literal 101 things, but it's some.

1. The default install is retarded. Even going through and deselecting a bunch of stuff (including all of gnome) I still wind up with 857 packages. Better yet, I deselected "printing support" but LOOK! Cups is still loaded! WTF?
2. I hate gpm, the console mouse thingy. Some folks probably love it. If I'm on a command line, I want just a command line. It's a little thing, and an "rpm -e gpm" fixes all, but I still hate it.
   
3. They've added this new NetworkManager thing which tries to windows-ify your system by making changes to your network settings. But gee, thanks, I set those a different way. Sure, there are ways you can work with it, and I'm sure for a laptop or something it's a nice feature, but this is a server, and I don't need it. Disabled!
4. SELinux. Oh, WOW this thing is fucking infuriating. Sure, it's probably essential to making your system very secure, but usually it seems to just be there to make working on the system unbearable. As I'm going through and configuring services to get the system back up and running like yesterday, EACH AND EVERY ONE runs into some wonderful new SELinux block. Maybe if I took the time to set it all up the right way it would be a good thing, but at this point it's just KILLING me. So, I disabled it altogether. A security tool that's this much of a pain in the ass to work with -- so that it leads folks to just plain disable it -- is no security tool at all.

All in all, I like working with Fedora. It's a good OS, it's stable and works well, just like most other Unix flavors, but just like any other... it's got some quirks which can be tough to deal with. The upside is I'm not trying to use Solaris. Now THERE is a quirky OS.