The Circle of Life is Complete

Red Hat Linux has finally completed the slow transformation into Windows 98.
Here


After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.

The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed. But the underlying problems run much deeper.

Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels. They have included, but were not limited to:
Chronic governance problems.
Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.
Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

There are all the problems that linux adherents criticize about Windows (and they are, for the most part, true when they say them). All complex projects eventually grind to stagnation unless interjected with competition and market forces (space shuttle anyone?) Linux has been in this phase for awhile. I expect the ad hominem attacks on Eric to begin forthwith.