Slashdot Mirror
OSNews Rates Fedora Core 1 Mild Disappointment
JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."
This is why people like me were bitching about Red hat's shift in focus.
Sure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be all but bulletproof and stable, but what about those of us who aren't using linux to displace Solaris or NT Servers?
What about those of us who want to do a little Gimping or serve our home LANs? At the risk of drawing the fire of the distro zealots, this is the precise reason why I switched to Mandrake at about the same time as RHAT's IPO.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I am using Fedora right now to write this comment. While some of the bugs mentioned in the article are valid points, I have no problems with multimedia playback, using yum and rpm.livna.org to download mplayer, xine and xmms-mp3 was quite painless. Perhaps the author should have subscribed to the fedora mailing list before he tried the distro. The RPM problem has been fixed, installation of ATI 3D drivers was painless.
I just want to give a big THANK YOU to the whole Fedora team. The release had its problems but I am happy with my setup!
Uh... yeah right, so this is my signature.
But I wish there were more people writing distro reviews. OSNews seems to be one of the few sources that get any play on here, ( heck, they may be one of the few sources full stop ), and it would be nice if we could get some variety of opinion / requirements / analysis from a variety of different viewpoints.
The gaming, productivity and utility software industries have hundreds of review sites spanning all over the web, and while I recognise that individual distro releases rarely represent as big a market impact to Joe Public as, say, the latest iD game, it would be nice to see a bit more heterogeny.
Just another thought - these reviews all seem to have to rush themselves, and rarely have time to evaluate long term issues or strengths that arise after a bit of persistant use ~ an example has been the recent rave reviews in the print media of Panther, which I adore, but had several showstopper bugs in .0 which nobody seemed to pick up on until they starting munching on user preferences for breakfast.
YLFIp.s. Worst run on sentance ever.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
This "review" is fundamentally flawed, because I have no idea where in the release notes or Fedora FAQs it states to do what she did to this box, this reads like a whine-fest because Red Hat did not fix her favorite bugs:
.71 to .72 right after you install your distribution, then Fedora probably is not for you. Or you could wait until updated RPMs hit the official repositories instead of grabbing Joe Bob's RPM build and wondering why your installation exploded.
a) So, the first thing she does is install a third party RPM and then wonders why it blows up in her face? How about the RPMs that came with the distribution? So, the install is brand new already broken in a VMWare installation.
b) Why is she using apt and synaptic? They don't even come with Fedora.
c) The RPM from Sun installs the JVM in all the Mozilla browser's (I didn't install KDE so I can't speak for Konqueror) and even integrates into the GNOME menu.
d) The well known limitations of Fedora's multimedia capabilities plague every linux distribution. It's not Fedora's fault that US laws suck. It's as easy to add multimedia in Fedora as it is in debian, you add one non-free source and you're done.
Here's a hint, if you're the kind of person that worries about moving from gaim
I don't trust Eugenia either. She seems much more obsessed with screenshots and themes than anything else(such as usability).
sure I'll have a sig.
I think you've made a good point, but Fedora will go a long way to resolving that situation - particularly as Red Hat's more immediately accessable default installer and desktop appeal more to new users - its a chance to get them hooked into bug reporting and, hopefully even better, documentation (one of the areas where Linux needs the msot improvement).
Look at what's happened over the last year - besides the Fedora merger, FreshRPMs, ATRPMs, NewRPMs, and Dag have combined to ensure consistent policy across their repositories. Yellowdog is now likely to become Fedora PPC too.
Developers who work on server software in particular (according to Netcraft and IDC Red Hat dominates in this area) might also be attracted to the 6 month release cycle of Fedora versus the perpetually updating and more bleeding edge testing or unstable.