Fedora 19 Released

hypnosec writes "The Fedora Project has officially announced the release of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' today. New features for the open source distribution include the developer's assistant, which accelerates development efforts by providing templates, samples and toolchains for a different languages; OpenShift Origin, which allows easy building of Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; node.js; Ruby 2.0.0; MariaDB; Checkpoint & Restore, which allows users to checkpoint and restore processes; and OpenLMI, which makes remote management of machines simpler. The distribution also packs GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspace 4.10 and MATE Desktop 1.6."

Comments

'Schrödinger's Cat' ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Damn. Now I'll never know if my system is up or down w/o opening the case.

Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[Jim Hall]

I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.

Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.

I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.

The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.

So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.

Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example and instructions). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.

Re:Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce

[RedHackTea]

Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first... After using Fedora 19 (Beta) for the past few weeks now, I can tell you that GNOME 3.8 has fixed most (if not all) of the stability issues that I used to encounter in Fedora 18. It runs smoother and faster for me. However, the dreaded "tracker" program and the initial installer are still bitches. Fedora fixed the Add and Update Software applications, but now GNOME has broken the Printer application (if use it on a LAN, it will present you with an authorization popup repeatedly for every computer). But internally, I am happier with hostnamectl and SELinux now; Fedora has appeared to fix some of the annoying issues in Fedora 18 at least. Lastly, I suggest LXDE over Xfce :D

Re:Oracle's copy

[_merlin]

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place, but I guess if you own the trademark you own the software.

Sigh... How many times will this need to be explained? All MySQL code was always Copyright MySQL AB. External contributions to the project required copyright assignment to MySQL AB (just like contributions to GNU projects require copyright assignment to FSF). Sun Microsystems bought the copyright to MySQL, and Oracle bought Sun. The copyright holder can release their IP under any license they want. They cannot revoke the GPL (or other copyleft) license on anything already released under that license. You don't lose your rights to anything MySQL AB and/or Sun Microsystems already released under GPL. But you have no right to demand that the copyright owner release future versions under any particular license.