Fedora Core 4 Reviewer Finds It Bloated

Provataki writes "TuxTops reviews Fedora Core 4 and finds a number of problems with the popular distribution: high memory usage, usability problems, bugs, bloat. They awarded FC4 with 6 out of 10 at the end as despite its quirks they also find it a 'powerful distro' and easy to use."

Comments

FC4 still runs too many services...

[rklrkl]

Fedora Core 4 still runs too many services that are not required, particularly in a PC desktop environment (e.g. software RAID monitor, at daemon, PCMCIA support, ACPI, cpuspeed), but they can be turned off fairly easily.

Ironically, the one disappointing feature of FC4 is that the DVD distro has actually been *cut down* compared to FC3's DVD - many packages (some of which are wildly popular like abiword, xmms or tuxracer) have been surprisingly moved off of even the DVD and shunted into Fedora Extras as an optional download instead. I think this was a knee-jerk response to people complaining that FC3 took up 4 CD's - fair enough, but why not keep the "bloat" for the FC4 DVD then and leave those packages off the CD version?

BTW, it always pays to wait a few weeks for initial bugs to be ironed out in Fedora releases - FC4's Firefox couldn't use the Sun Java plug-in with SELinux enabled until they released a policy patch to sort this out for instance. Mind you, I think the Anaconda installer should optionally allow you to download updates before it completes its installation - SuSE's YaST does, so why not not Anaconda?

Re:Can't we do better?

[Phisbut]

It's a sad state of affairs when a fourth generation release of probably the best supported Linux distro available can only gain a 6 out of 10 rating.

It got a 6 out of 10 from one reviewer who wasn't even able to get a DVD working... I mean, I know nothing about that guy, but the simple fact that he couldn't get a DVD working (while I installed FC4 from DVD on 3 different computers, with 3 completely different settings; and I'm also quite sure thousands of other people installed from DVD without any problem), doesn't give him a whole lot of credibility to me.

What he encountered is not a problem with the distribution, it's an anecdote.

This guy is clueless

[VStrider]

From TFA:

the installation screen won't initialized and load without beforehand adding the "nofb" or the "vga=971" command in the kernel configuration line.
On certain hardware you need to pass these options, no matter what distro you're installing. Are you complaining about having to type a few extra characters on his first boot?

FC4 booted much faster than any previous version, still though, not as fast as other distros like Arch and Gentoo.
Gentoo is faster from other distros, but I don't see any difference on boot times. And anyway, if you're gonna complain about nofb, I can sure tell you that Gentoo is not for you. The installation is nothing but easy.

But I wasn't as happy with the memory consumption. About 230 MBs of RAM were used on a clean, default load (according to "free", just after the OS loaded -- no major cashing has occured yet).
Linux uses memory more aggressively than windows, and tries to avoid swapping, while windows does the opposite. This is the first complain I hear from windows users using linux. You need to understand that you *want* your memory to be used. The more memory is used, the faster your programs will run. And btw here's my free on Gentoo:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513828 428216 85612 0 50048 176256
-/+ buffers/cache: 201912 311916
Swap: 506008 4024 501984

As you can see, most of my RAM is used. This does not slow the system down. It has the opposite effect. Anyway, I'm glad no major 'cashing' occured on your system. :D

I find this requirement huge, it means that computers with 256 MBs of RAM will swap heavily after only a few minutes of using the system (e.g. after opening Firefox and Evolution or OOo alone).
No you got it totally wrong. See above.

I had to go and unload some services before I could see the RAM usage go down
Most of these 'services' you stopped are init scripts that run once at boot and do nothing afterwards. So your RAM usage going down is most likely the placebo effect. Get a clue.

And btw, why can't I kill completely 'eggcups' (it keeps respawning) which takes so much RAM, and I don't even have a printer in my house?
Are you serious? you cann't stop a service? And you're writing a review on a linux distro???

Also of importance is the fact that Fedora does not automount FAT/NTFS partitions and so new users will find this a bit dissapointing.
Which free distro automounts a FAT/NTFS partition? AFAIK, none. But anyway all you got to do is add 1 (ONE) line to your fstab.

Having to use "mount" in the command line or have to mess up with your /etc/fstab is hardly fun.
Is this the same guy who was talking about arch and gentoo? :D

Why did this horrible review made it on /. ?