Fedora 16, OpenSuse 12.1 Betas With Gnome 3.2

Andy Smith writes "Fedora 16 beta and OpenSuse 12.1 beta have been released. For most users the major change in each distro is Gnome 3.2. Fedora also adopts the new Linux 3 kernel and the GRUB2 bootloader."

Comments

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[armanox]

Did they ever make GRUB2 configurable? Last time I used GRUB2 it was a mess - what ever happened to simplicity?

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Compared with LILO, GRUB is still complex.

Re:No grub 2

[armanox]

That is GRUB 2. Since GRUB2 is not yet a stable release they haven't moved the number to 2.x.

Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE is Gnome 2

[Forget4it]

LMDE is a good alternative maintained Linux that continues with the latest Gnome 2 not 3
http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Re:Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE is Gnome 2

[Vancorps]

In what way has Unity reduced the utility of desktop machines? As a Unity user with multiple monitors I'm quite interested in the reply especially since this is a laptop with a docking station. I'm surprised how well it works, in the old days to put the laptop on the docking station I'd have to logout and back in or restart X, now everything just works and auto-detects nicely.

I'll admit that laughing multiple instances of the same app from Unity wasn't all that intuitive at first I now understand why and it works fairly well. I'm also impressed with the integration of other workspaces.

Also, I have a theme, I've branded my desktop environment to match corporate branding, wasn't very difficult either. So what you say is so confusing to me.

Re:No grub 2

[jhdsl]

More like lilo needed to be reinstalled after every kernel change.
If you forgot or something went wrong you where SOL.
GRUB only needs to update its files in the filesystem.
Also, GRUB has a command line from where you can choose kernel to boot if things got messed up.
GRUB can also boot more things than LILO can.

Re:No grub 2

[diegocg]

No, LILO doesn't work fine. LILO always was incredibly unreliable, it needs to know the fixed location of the kernel inside the disk (if you move your kernel it stops working). I can't count the times my system stopped booting because of stupid things like that. GRUB in the other hand can read filesystems so it doesn't need to know where kernels are, only the stages are neccesary. Even if it fails to find a kernel it has an interactive editor where you can list the available files in the /boot directory, which is useful for recovery. Also, LILO doesn't support UEFI.

GNOME 3 is growing on me

[DrXym]

Be in no doubt GNOME 3 has some pretty stupid omissions but the core experience is actually pretty slick and task centric. You can see and arrange all your activities from one screen, you use your apps from another screen. It comes second nature to use and it looks great, easily comparable to OS X or Windows 7.

As I said it has some issues and I wish they'd be sorted. Biggest for me is there are no desktop icons unless you enable it from a tweak tool. This oversight / omission is just bizarre. The second omission is lots of settings that gnome-tweak-tool exposes should have been in the options dialogs from the get go - things like enabling minimize / maximize buttons, font sizes and so on. I do not accept that these things are not basic configuration settings that every user should have access to by default. The final annoyance is while the activities screen is okay most of the time, the fact is that it would be useful to have a task launcher which is visible without flipping screens.

So I don't have bad impressions but it needs more refinement. Unity by comparison is really getting on my nerves and I used to be more favourably inclined to that effort than I was to GNOME. Maybe if Ubuntu actually fixed some of the more stupid "features" like the global menus and floating scrollbars it might be more tolerable.

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[AdamWill]

Mac EFI with Fedora has been a real piece of work all along, just because - as you say on your page - the Mac EFI implementation is hideous. Actually, the Fedora devs responsible for the EFI support say they explicitly don't support Macs just because the EFI implementation is so crap/weird. Macs are a best effort, I'm afraid.

Re:No grub 2

[AdamWill]

ironically, neither does grub2. well, it does, but very badly. we're actually still using grub-legacy for EFI installs in F16, because grub2-efi is just too unreliable at present.

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[AdamWill]

well, we *could* have switched to it at any time, but it's made a bit awkward by the fact that the only real benefit of switching is upstream support. despite its ridiculous panoply of shiny features, grub2 doesn't give Fedora much that grub didn't, really. we're only switching now because we decided the pain threshold of essentially maintaining grub-legacy ourselves downstream had been reached.

in fact, if we were doing things over, we'd probably switch at f17 instead, because we haven't been able to make grub2 work well enough for EFI installs or PPC installs, so we still have to use grub-legacy for those, and that's just causing a ton of annoying complexity and possible breakage in the installer and upgrade paths.

Re:Welcome to the 21st century

[Junta]

Average users need not touch grub.conf. The ones that do should understand how to hit 'c' or 'e' to recover without a rescue disk.

Scenarios where I've seen someone forced to 'rescue' are when the available initrds are fubared, and 'update-grub' won't prevent that.

Two things I hate windows for are binary registry and bcd files. Steering away from plain text to protect the user is not an aspect I want to see mimicked, as when it fails to protect, it actually makes the problem worse.