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 was released too early

[NZheretic]

The folks at Redhat have really been pushing the envelope with core components of the Linux system. GCC4, GCJ, Xen, SELinux, X.org, DBus and HAL are all going to be adopted by the rest of the Linux distributions and venders in the near future.

Note: "in the near future". Just like when Redhat pushed the envelope by adopting GCC3 and ELF at an early stage,in comparison to Redhat's x.2 and x.3 releases, the x.0 and x.1 result has been slightly flaky at the edges.

I think that Fedora Core 4 was released two months too early. Another couple of months in rawhide development would have ironed out a few more of the kinks.

Fedora Core is for productivity

[digitect]

Fedora Core strikes me as a good balance between Free and current. Sure there is no MP3 playback, but that is because Red Hat long ago decided to keep it's distributions free of any software using licenses that were not Free Software. There are plenty of other media formats that are as good or even better. And there are plenty of places that provide a way to add MP3 support, it's just that the distro has decided to keep the base 100% free. (Which is fine with me, I'd prefer that than starting to rely on some software that gets yanked in a year because it's copyright holders decided to start charging an arm and a leg for it.)

Fedora is also up to date. Here again, the basement dwellers among us can point to XYZ distribution that has bleeding-edge package ABC. But the FC packages alwyas seem to work within the distro. From time to time I'll venture out into one of the alternate repositories or closed-source drivers and I always regret it. The system gets unstable or something else stops working.

Which brings me to my main point, Fedore Core is proving to be a fine distribution for my productivity. I have long lost interest in tweaking and exploring the system deep into the night, now I just need one that I can use for email and web browsing, authoring various documents, develop software, draw, do genealogy, personal finances, etc. I'm not saying FC is perfect, nothing is. But it's usefulness is equal and better than my Windows XP station at work. Every release gets better, and while I want to see continuing advancements in my desktop environment, I also need one that is useful to me now.

Balance is rarely appreciated (I like Honda, too) but it's a sign of both skill and maturity. Keep it up team.