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Fedora 16, OpenSuse 12.1 Betas With Gnome 3.2

Posted by timothy on from the despite-gripes-it-gets-better dept.

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."

4 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE is Gnome 2 by Forget4it · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
    Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
  2. Re:No grub 2 by diegocg · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. GNOME 3 is growing on me by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

  4. Re:Welcome to the 21st century by AdamWill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.