Slashdot Mirror
Fedora Core 2 Dud or Dodo?
darth_silliarse writes "Linux.com have posted an interesting review Fedora Core 2, which includes reference to the now famous Windows/Fedora Core 2 dual booting "feature". My favorite quote "Unfortunately, all of FC2's admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects. These range from annoyances such as broken audio drivers to the abomination known as Gnome 2.6, and are serious enough to make the Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals." Quite a indictment don't you think? My fav distro is SuSE but I'm interested to hear others views about this review..."
Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue. This bug exists in Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1, and i'm sure any other 2.6 / grub distribution. See this story.
I am normally a gentoo user but slapped Fedora core 2 on an XP machine for fun. It seems to be plenty stable enough on a standard Dell and the sound appears to be working fine when I used it.
The main problems I have had are the lack of MP3 support out of the box, and no default inclusion of niceties like flash, nvidia drivers, and java (I know they are not open source but a quick-download utility to get them separately would be nice). Even some OSS software like K3B is not included by default even though I chose KDE packages at install time.
On the good side, it was stupidly simple to setup (I love gentoo but bootstrapping has never been fun and an SATA system I setup required some prestedigitation to get running) the up2date utility is simple to use and has that nifty icon tray to alert you when there are new updates. It has all the standard development utilities in relatively recent versions and while I am not a regular Gnome user the desktop seems quite polished with good fonts default out of the box.
In summation, it certainly ain't perfect, but I haven't found any real problems to complain about either. While I'll stick to Gentoo on machines that I want to develop on, Fedora seems fine for a workstation that is easy to maintain.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Most of the text I've read in the past on linux.com is a wash -- too heavy on the histrionics and not enough on the facts. Because of this I usually avoid linux.com like the plague for facts. Furthermore it's not my first choice for finding out accurate information about distros.
;-) )
(Heh, Slashdot is way more factual
FYI, I have been using FC2 for about a week now. I'm a KDE / fluxbox user so I have no opinion on Gnome. After starting from scratch (previously was using Red Hat 9), my poor 200 Mhz / 128 Mb RAM PC is working much better. Everything else I have installed (Java 1.4, RealPlayer, MP3 support for XMMS, prboom, Timidity and so on) has been fine, no issues.
--- You are in a little twisty maze of comments, all different.
I've recently made the switch from Debian 'sid' to Gentoo, after frustration with certain Debian policies. I'd previously built a dual Opteron workstation with Gentoo, and found it worked so well that I rebuilt my Pentium 4 workstation with Gentoo as well.
It took 24 hours to completely recompile everything -- base package, KDE, office suites, development tools, Samba -- on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4. I didn;t find this terribly onerous, and the end result is a very clean, fast system. In spite of what some people say, I do see a significant difference in having my code compiled to the hardware it runs on. Heck, I was able to use -ffast-math for the major numerical packages -- try doing *that* with a precompiled distro. :)
I was a Debian user for several years; I still have a dual Pentium 3 and a Sun Ultra 10 running Debian 'sid'. I've used (even paid for) Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, and Slackware over the years. And Beyond the time spent compiling, gentoo has been the most pleasant experience yet.
The nice thing about Linxu is that there are so many distros, giving everyone what they want. For me, at this time, Gentoo works very, very well.
All about me
No offense, but sounds like Mandrake would be a better distro for you, if you're using KDE as the default and installing all the "wrong license" packages (which are already included in Mandrake).
Chris
It's not poorly tested. They know the bug they just released anyway.
Exactly, even linux geeks don't want to spend hours manually configuring sound card drivers to get rid of white noise!
But I guess, Fedora is cutting edge, so you get the bugs on it.
Personally, I've seen too many bugs in all the new distros, Gentoo, Mandrake (which had serious nforce driver issues), Fedora.
Mandrake 9 and SuSE are the most cleanest, stable and need less config time to setup.
I think install reviews need a "configuration" section, how much did you need to configure to get rid of annoyances or to get applications working. If you had to google or read a forum to fix a bug on install, the distro goes from 100% to 90%.
Maybe Linux distro's for desktop use needs quality control? It's half way through 2004, and the current batch of distros (bsd included) are configuration messes. WTF happened?
Sorry to jump so late into the conversation, but I am extremely impressed with Fedora Core 2. It's by far the smoothest and most well-integrated linux distro I've used.
The fonts look great. The mime handlers are set up right so I get sensible options to handle files that I download from a web browser. Thunderbird comes integrated with gpg.
Nautilus is just bizarrely fast - and I rather like the spatial thing. Spatial nautilus is terrible for just browsing a filesystem, but for doing real work like moving files around it's great. (And if you want to just browse, select "Browse filesystem.") I can type smb://wherever from the "run" dialog and have it browse windows servers. Great stuff.
And in general, Gnome 2.0 is very nice looking and user-friendly. It opens my files fine, it has software to to just about everything I use a computer for. For the first time ever, a newly installed distro has the feel of a computer that a real expert worked on, installing all the interesting plugins, getting stuff properly integrated, doing the little tweaks that I always had to do myself (Or more likely never bothered to do and just put up with minor inconveniences).
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I want a distro that I can install and just use. The only real customization I've had to do was manually install gdesklets and beep-media-player and get lm_sensors working. (The latter failed because my sensors aren't supported under 2.6 kernels yet.)
With yum, between the main repository and freshrpms, I have just about anything I might want to install.
Compared to my gentoo-using friends, I feel almost guilty about how easy it is to use, as if I was a Windows user or something.
It's just a fine distro, in my opinion. It reflects the hard work of a lot of generous people, and this review is unreasonably mean-spirited.
I was a RH - then Mandrake - junkie from 1998 until 2003. Then I tried SuSE and found it to be a very nice distro, and it became my desktop distro of choice. I had only minimal exposure to Debian/potato. I just upgraded my server to the testing/sarge distro, and have to wonder why any experienced user would live with the many issues I encountered in the above distros, including utilities that didn't work, poorly tested packages, and unresolveable system slowdowns. All of the above distros are very nice if you have little or no experience with gnu/linux, but I can't tell you how impressed I am with debian. It still has a lot of legs left in it, and kde has advanced to the point where many of the Mandrake Control Center/YaST tools are redundant. The only extra package I installed for convenience was synaptic. I have also replaced my desktop with debian. debian testing, and unstable for that matter, seems more stable than Mandrake or FC (I haven't tried FC2 or SuSE 9.1 so can't comment on them). And to the writer of the article, enough of the gnome 2.6 bashing. We all get the point - a lot of people don't like it, but it is a matter of choice isn't it? And a lot of the nautilus issues have been worked out, such as browsing SMB shares. Lighten up Francis!
I just upgraded my FC1 installation to FC2. What I'm noticing is how many things have been improved but not to the point where I can say that I've used no better desktop systems. Unfortunately the problems I notice exist in virtually every GNU/Linux distribution, so they don't all have to do with FC2 per se. A little about me: I am a programmer and quite familiar with the benefits of having software freedom. I understand a lot of the underlying technical issues for making an OS that "just works". As I grow older I no longer care about following the details. My attention turns toward bigger picture items now, like how can I easily make backups of my documents, how can I easily uninstall software, how can I easily move from one application to its competitor.
I am becoming a firm believer in clean installs rather than upgrades because upgrades so often just don't work. No operaing system provides everything you need, so people routinely install third-party software and even on MacOS X (which is touted as being far simpler and far more unified, hence far better for the desktop user) I have not yet known anyone to be able to avoid problems with system upgrades. Clean installs also offer people a chance to do something they too often never do: make backups.
Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on. I thought this feature would be there in FC2 final release (it wasn't there in prereleases) and it apparently isn't there. I've been told that this is a Linux kernal feature so if I want the feature back I would have to become out of sync with kernel upgrades supplied by the Fedora Core project and lose the ability to easily upgrade my kernel via FC's up2date. I don't care how easy it is to recompile a kernel once you've gotten the swing of it, I've got much more important issues on my plate and, while I appreciate the software freedom aspect of the Linux kernal, I value my time; I value being able to get on with what I use a computer to do. I'm looking to make things easier on myself, not introduce more maintenance.
The sound system in GNU/Linux is still not unified and smoothly working. I still can't be sure that I can simultaneously play bzflag while listening to some Ogg Vorbis files (or a streamed downloaded) with XMMS or Rhythmbox. On other systems (like later versions of NeXTSTEP and most if not all versions of MacOS X), sound is easy to use and simultaneous sound sources work right out of the box. This is one area of desktop usage where I am content to dissuade letting a thousand flowers bloom (in terms of what is shipped to the end-user) because I would prefer instead to have a single simple (no-setup-needed, it just works right out of the box) sound system. But I don't know (or care to learn) the technical details which prevent this from working smoothly. I figure that this is something that should be provided by any distribution. Recording sound is also a mess: the GNOME sound recorder program still crashes in such a way that no Bug Buddy is brought up to help me easily submit a crash report to the developers and there are way too many sliders on the sound volume panel to know what I want to do without having to learn grotty details about something I should be able to just use. I doubt this situation would remain acceptable if measured against its competition on other operating systems.
I understand that some users want e-mail and calendar integration, so Evolution looks like an attractive program. I think more users want trainable spam filtering and I don't see where Evolution 1.4 (the version of Evolution I got with FC2) provides trainable spam filtering. So Evolution is a non-starter for me. I'll take Mozilla mail or Thunderbird over Evolution because I don't co
Digital Citizen
Personally, had it not been for Mandrake I'd still be using Windows. But Mandrake made the transition very easy (an essential part was detecting and mounting my NTFS partitions automatically, as my music was on one and working without music is a bore). Now after a year I don't even dual boot anymore.
With this experience I could probably now switch rather easily to a better respected distribution among Slashdot crowd (Debian and Gentoo seem to be the distributions of choice here), but the thing is, I don't want to. While I do enjoy working with my computer, I don't enjoy working on my computer, that is spending too much time configuring things. Granted if I'd use my box as a server I'd want to do it. But I don't, it's a desktop plus a developement platform for small LAMP/JSP work. And for this purpose it excels. (pun not intended ;-) If all you need to do is for example get Apache (with mod_perl/mod_php) and MySQL up and running, it's a matter of couple urpmi's (via CLI or GUI) and clicking a few buttons in MDK Control Center to get the services running (and naturally making sure your firewall is properly set). And you're done! Granted, I haven't tried Debian or Gentoo but I have a feeling this isn't quite as simple with them (please do correct me if I'm mistaken).
Another issue at least for me is those mentioned "wrong license" packages. While I do understand that for example mp3 support may be (is, even) a legal issue, it doesn't change the fact that most of my music is in the format. When I tried RH9 it really wasn't difficult at all to get Synaptic running and install mp3 support for xmms - however, in my oh so humble opinion, it's annoying and wastes my time. And PLF repositories for Mandrake are godsend, if you need software that's legal status isn't quite clear (not to say pirated though).
So yes, I at least am very happy with Mandrake. And yes, I'm very glad (and not even a bit offended) that it was reccommended to me (not in Slashdot, though). Diversity (even with distributions) is a good thing, right?
I share your feelings on Mandrake. I started my linux experience with Redhat 5.2 but found Mandrake (with KDE) a better / easier experience altogether. I didn't have to fight my sound and video card configurations to get them working, etc. Fast forward several years and Mandrake 10 whomps on FC2 in many respects. It is a more complete distro, features many intelligent conveniences (such as Numlock ON kernel module - why hasn't anyone else put that in their distro?).
I have tried Debian (horrendously dated - even SID), gentoo (arcane and too time consuming) and I KEEP ON GOING BACK TO MANDRAKE. I wanted to love FC2...believe me. I ran FC1 and thought it was okay, but not as good as Mandrake 9.2
I tried FC2test3 for several weeks and FC2 final for a couple and just flat gave up. I run Mandrake 10 official now on an HP zd7188cl laptop and on a custom-built Athlon desktop. I LOVE IT! Everything I need works great. Once I figured out how to optimize my urpmi server configs and get the reliable package repositories in place, upgrading for security fixes and adding new software is a snap! (I do it using the command line urpmi app which is just as easy as apt-get). The only thing I wish Mandrake would do is make the package manager gui apps unified (not one to remove and one to install - that's ridiculous) and make it as user-friendly as Synaptic is.
One of the biggest frustrations I had was trying to get Crossover Office 3 running properly under FC2. I have it under Mandrake 10 with absoulutely perfect and very responsive performance. Not so under FC2, with many many issues. And yes, I spent lots of time on the valiant work-around efforts documented by the Codeweavers team. They even scripted in disable functions for problematic aspects of FC2, but it didn't really work.
Long story short, you can try other distros, but you'll always keep on coming back home. I thought it would be cool to give gentoo a shot and I hated it. Similar idea but much better execution is Arch Linux. That is worth your time! Try arch and you may love it. Even in beta it is remarkably stable.
I _am_ going to give Suse 9.1 serious consideration for business use - and if I love it, for my desktop at home. BUT, it will really have to live up to the hype to move me off of Mandrake now that 10.0 official is out.
Another thing about Mandrake and "slashdotter distros" - Mandrake can be used for the most complex of server environments and yet out of the box is the best desktop experience around with minimal fuss. THAT is what makes Mandrake different from "handholder" desktop distros like Linspire and Lycoris that are for the casual user that doesn't want to know the CLI exists.
PS > Bluecurve is FUGlY!