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Initial Reactions to Fedora Core 5
Ki writes to tell us that he has put up a short review of Fedora Core 5 which covers the install and general first impressions to the new release. The author highlights several quirks in the installation and a few problems getting down to business, but overall the Fedora team seems to have made some very good progress.
Umm, didn't you notice that Fedora is the development testbed? It's supposed to update quickly so new things get tested before RedHat gives them to paying customers. If you're doing real work on Fedora, I feel your pain. Switch your servers to Centos, and save Fedora for playing on your desktop!
Centos + Dag Wieers' repo is a sweet setup. Dag, if you read this, thanks a lot for great packages.
They could indeed borrow things from other distos, and they do. It's the entire point of collaborative software. However, each distrobution has its own particular style and way of doing things; ultimately, it comes down to user preference in most cases. For example, Slackware is your rock solid, never-fail distribution for servers and tinkerers; Ubuntu is your user friendly, easy-to-use distribution with great support for mom and pop; SuSE and RHEL are for corporate machines requiring easy administration and solid integration with existing technologies; Gentoo and LFS are for those intereeted in learning about the core of the system (and for masochists with lots of time).
It all boils down to preference and application. Successful approaches are shared for the good of all.
There are a few things you need to consider before giving Fedora a try.
1. No NTFS support: If dual boot, you will not be able to read your Windows partitions.
2. No MP3 support (it's been like that for a while.)
3. No support for propietary drivers: I've been told that this is more of a bug than an intended feature, but I haven't heard any certainty to support either side.
4. No ReiserFS
It's also missing the Tango Icons, Anjuta, and a few more apps. They aren't necessarily deal breakers, but with a 5 cd download, you'd expect them to be there. Lack of MP3 support is by design, although a lot of people really aren't aware of it. Items 1,3,4 can all be resolved by compiling your own kernel, but not everyone enjoys doing that, - and with a newly released distro, you probably shouldn't have to. I can understand no NTFS and MP3 support for patent issues, but why no ReiserFS?
Here is a link to one of the reviews that I came across. You should probably check the Forbidden Items List as well.
That's nothing... Gentoo's already up to 2006.0 .
Just to provide an alternative perspective, I couldn't disagree more. I've used Fedora since FC1, and have found it to be a useful, stable desktop. The reviewer's experiences in no way match mine, which have essentially been "stick the CD in, install and start using it". I've never seen any of the problems mentioned, and nor have I heard of anyone else having them. Sure, hardware detection issues can be an occasional problem for any distribution, but from what I've seen, Fedora does better than any other distribution I've used on that front. I guess he just got unlucky.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
"One size fits all" doesn't work for operating systems.
Stuff that works very well for certain types of users may be incredibly annoying for other types.
For example, Ubuntu is designed to be very friendly to new users. As a power user, the first time I tried Ubuntu it was like bashing my head against a brick wall repeatedly. It's a great distro for many people, it's just *not* for me. (And IMHO, not for anyone trying to set up a server machine.)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gentoo is an excellent distro for experienced power users, but it's a nightmare for new users. (In fact, it gives those new users more than enough rope to hang themselves. New Gentoo users typically push their CFLAG optimizations to insane and unstable limits because they can and it's cool, in the end breaking their system. Those are the users that the "Gentoo is for Ricers" page targets.) This is why I use Gentoo but would not ever reccommend it to a Linux newbie.
Fedora Core is somewhere in the middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo. As such, it tends to be the distro I reccommend to new people who want a system that's reasonably easy to get started with but still allows you to become familiar with the "down and dirty" details of a Linux installation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?