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:FC4 still runs too many services...

[J.Y.Kelly]

The cutting down of the core distribution was an intentional decision and is arguably a good rather than a bad thing. It arose from the (eventual) appearance of Fedora extras which is the community maintanined set of packages for fedora. This marks a passing of control from Redhat to the community and pushes Fedora towards being the community oriented distribution it was promised to be. You can expect that the core FC5 distribution will be even smaller than FC4 with more packages moved to Extras. What was bad about the FC4 release is that Extras has yet to be tied in to the installer, which means that the installing or upgrading of these packages must be done post install. One of the goals for FC5 is to have Extras available at install time.

Not a Fan

[niskel]

I have never really been a fan of Fedora. I tried core 3 for amd64 when it came out. I found I didn't have the control I wanted and regularly found myself in dependancy hell. I also found it had way to much stuff I would never use and didn't have mp3 playbck that I would. I know it isn't hard to get it, but still. I have since moved to Gentoo and am very happy.

Re:Not a Fan

[Professor_UNIX]

I think what people are forgetting is that Fedora Core was never designed to be a stable distribution. It's there to shake out the bugs before stuff moves into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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.

Re:FC4 was released too early

[bill_mcgonigle]

Every Fedora Core release is released too early. That's its nature.

A Fedora Core release +6 months of patches is a really nice system you can run for a year. By that time there's another FC+6 months release available.

A new FC release is fun to have as a play/development system but noone should expect to depend on it.

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.

More reviews

[youknowmewell]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1830880,00.as p

http://www.osjournal.com/content/85/Reviews/A_look _at_Fedora_Core_4/

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2 005/6/28/prodit/11304408&sec=prodit

These reviews aren't quite so negative as the review posted on /. . Funny how that is.

What is the Red Hat distro of choice?

[Otter]

I've been planning a switch from Gentoo anyway (Portage has just gotten too big to use over dialup and I can't get a 2.6 kernel to power off correctly) and yesterday a bunch of people informed me that Linux Is, In Fact, Ready For The Desktop if I'd just switch distros yet again.

I'd like to go back to a Red Hat variant, but am confused by the various clone options -- Fedora, CentOS, White Box, etc. Can anyone sugggest why one of those might be preferable to the others? (Hint: one thing I've learned from Gentoo is that the packaging system is only as good as the repository behind it.)

FC4 is pretty good

[frag thief]

Aint variety grand? I'm running FC4 and love it.

Sure it has some kinks, but I accept that since Fedora tends to push the envelope. It's really not 'Linux for Mom' like Ubuntu. Fedora requires some heavy lifting and some RTFM-ism. I've always liked Gnome and 2.10 with Clearlooks is just gorgeous. FC4 boots faster and does a good job of detecting hardware. A week or two ago I swapped my motherboard and processor and it booted up with everything working -- despite my changing 90% of the chipset including sound and networking.

Can you imagine doing that on a Windows box?

Yes, multimedia is emasculated thanks to software patent boogeymen in the US. I do all my ripping to OGG Vorbis anyway which is supported out of the box. I've yet to find any use for the Helix movie player though.

I got caught up in the flaming when Redhat "abandoned" the free desktop but that turned out to be a lot of hype. I even went looking for a replacement after Redhat 9 but kept coming back to Fedora. I really like their "workstation" install.

For me, Fedora occupies a comfortable zone between "I can install it it in 30 mins" and "I can use it for just about any need."

memory bloat measuring technique?

[ArmorFiend]

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). 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).

I'm not sure about the memory-bloat measuring technique he's using. I just installed FC4 on a 128mb machine, and after boot and gnome login, only 48K of swap is in use - that's nothing! According to his supposition I should be swapping like a banshee already. I think his RAM-measuring technique is not accurate.

No Surprise Here

[Steinfiend]

It's always amazed me how people haven't noticed this about RedHat based distros before. At least the consumer ones, I can't comment on their Enterprise edition. Going back to RedHat 7.x installed on a semi-reasonable laptop was definitely a little "turgid".

As much as I tried to clean and lean the system it still felt slow. A previous comment about services running that aren't required holds very true, as a knowledgeable amateur I was able to discern which services were stoppable but if this is really the Year Linux Takes The Desktop(tm) then things have to be much more beginner oriented. Even then it wasn't as spritely as an OS designed for a 386, the latest and greatest super computer and everything in between should be. I blamed Gnome at the time, but honestly even running CLI only it wasn't satisfying.

Of course I now have a new laptop running Ubuntu and the world is good. I feel bad for all those years spent avoiding anything related to Debian. If anyone wants to get a friend/relative/particularly attractive stranger interested in Linux, give them an Ubuntu CD, a quick 5 minute lesson on backing up and partitioning and they are good to go!

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.

Without a GUI

[bzant]

I run FCx on many of my home servers, without the GUI, and I have found them all to be very stable, low memory consumption, and easy to update.

I just installed FC4 on a file server so I will see how that goes, but I expect it will be solid as the others.

And if you don't like the packages that come with FC4, roll your own, I don't install the default httpd, I always get the source and compile my own.

I like the FCx distros, 'cause it is easy to get a solid base install of a very current kernel. When I am trying to manage many servers across multiple locations, I just want something that works.

Re:Bloat what bloat?

[int19h]

I understand this attitude, of "do it yourself if you are unhappy", since meritocracies often work, but this kind of thinking is flawed, IMHO.

In extreme cases of meritocracy:
- You are not allowed to wish for anything, unless you do it yourself
- You are not allowed to report a bug, unless you do it yourself
- You are not allowed to express your opinion about something, unless you FIX IT YOURSELF. (yelling intended) ;)

I would much rather have a world where people are allowed to express themselves about things like open source software, and discuss it, than having to fix it themselves right away.

If users weren't able to state negative sides about the software, there would be no valuable feedback.

So, please: Even though a coder is worth a gazillion critics, let people say what they feel without telling them to fix it themselves. :-)

Wrong interpretation.

[kosmosik]

This is common newbie mistake -- "Why does my system takes entire RAM aviable?" -- Well RAM is in machine to be used. What for you need RAM if it stays unused? So it is actually a *Good* *Thing* that most of the RAM is used - it means that operating system is working good with memory management.

What was wrong? The interpretation. I've bet that author stated full memory usage but hasn't bother to check how much of this "used" RAM was taken by system buffers and how much by real applications? I use Fedora day to day on my laptop - I've tweaked it a bit (to be honest). Disabled services, use WindowMaker instead of bloated GNOME/KDE, Opera instead of Mozilla etc. After boot -- X11 with WindowMaker, few services (postgres, httpd for developement) -- the system (not buffers) takes ~50MB RAM, but of course free(1) shows ~240MB (with system buffers).

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 /. ?

bloated

[smash]

For all intents and purposes it *is* bloated.

And no, i'm not talking about memory usage - 4 CDs worth, and it didn't even detect/include apps for power management on my laptop.

Wtf? This is 2005...

Ubuntu detected everything, gave me fully working power management, etc as standard.

The package manager is brain-damaged... rather than installing from CDs in sequence, adding/removing packages after install results in swapping CDs several times (ie, CD1 is requested 2-3 times or more), rather than loading everything it needs from CD1 first, etc.

It looks pretty, but as far as use goes, its crap, imho.

smash (Linux user since 1996)