back to article Fedora 14: haven for Ubuntu's homeless GNOMEs

Fedora 14, released Tuesday, has quite a bit of new stuff under the hood - things you probably won't notice most unless you're a systems admin or use Fedora for development. For Fedora this is business as usual and, many would argue, the way it should be. After all, the latest UI bling is useless if the underlying system isn't …

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  1. Steve McIntyre
    Thumb Down

    Fedora fanboy?

    "It also makes a nice contrast to Canonical's Ubuntu, which has a habit of taking Fedora's upstream contributions, wrapping them in a prettier package and stealing the limelight. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the nature of open source software - you can do what you want with it. It's just that Fedora rarely ends up getting the credit it deserves for making desktop Linux as usable as it has become over the years."

    All of the Linux distros tend to work with upstream, providing new features and bugfixes. Your words make it sound like only Fedora are doing that.

    1. Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik

      Expect...

      "All of the Linux distros tend to work with upstream, providing new features and bugfixes. Your words make it sound like only Fedora are doing that."

      ... when they don't. Which debian/ubuntu certainly don't do a lot... They patch the hell out of things. I believe fedora isn't as bad as that but not far behind.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Versions

      Check the versions of packages that are shipping in Fedora compared to packages that ship with Ubuntu and you will see the author's point.

      Fedora's packages are much much newer (and much less tested) at the time of release, this is the risk of Fedora, and why it's called "bleeding edge."

  2. Adam Williamson 1
    Alert

    A few points

    "But when it comes to desktop Linux, does anyone use the default theme?"

    Yeah, me. :)

    "There is one thing missing in this release: Fedora no longer ships with the Pino social network client. Its absence is probably due to the fact that Pino hasn't yet updated to Twitter's new OAuth system, but the fact that Gwibber wasn't dropped in its place suggests perhaps Fedora is dropping the idea of including a Twitter client. Frankly, given Fedora's overall focus on development tools, Pino did feel a bit out of place."

    At first we were expecting this to be fixed with a new version of Pino in time for F14. In the event, that didn't happen. By the time it became clear Pino wasn't going to be working well enough with OAuth for F14 release date, it was a bit late to introduce a new application to the default desktop and be sure it wouldn't cause any problems, so we decided to go with the safer option of just dropping Pino and not replacing it with anything else.

    "This release will also see the expansion of Fedora's netbook spin, integrating MeeGo for mobile devices. For most users that means netbooks, though MeeGo has also been adopted by Nokia for use on mobile phones.

    For Fedora 14 the core MeeGo 1.0 packages are all available either as a separate spin or through Yum with yum groupinstall meego-netbook. The MeeGo integration builds on the foundations laid by the Moblin spin in previous Fedora releases."

    I've got to admit this makes me giggle a bit in an article described as a Fedora 14 review. The joke being...Meego doesn't work in F14. Not at all. Now, that clearly is our fault, but the fact that you (and all the other journalists reporting on this, to be fair) just include the optimistic vision mentioned in the release publicity makes it clear you didn't bother (or, rather, given the absurd publication dates sites work to these days, have the time for) actually trying the thing. =)

    There's only a couple of volunteer contributors working on Meego in Fedora (no paid staff, from RH or from anyone else) and they just didn't manage to iron out the bugs by release time. There's a bug which prevents you from launching Meego at all and we haven't figured out how to fix it yet. So Fedora folks took it out of the feature list and it's not mentioned in the publicity from Fedora proper, but unfortunately the message didn't get to Red Hat PR department in time, so it is mentioned - as if it all works great - in the Red Hat PR on F14. Oops. Sorry about that. So, yeah, don't download F14 expecting a neat Meego netbook interface, you won't get one, unless you can fix the bug (do let us know). You'd be better off getting Meego-the-distro direct from upstream, or Novell's Smeegol thing for now.

    (Do note, though, that the Plasma - KDE as was - netbook interface is available in F14, and by all accounts works rather well.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      I'll definately be looking at it...

      Since Ubuntu turned its netbook interface in to a hash pudding, I welcome a decent alternative.

  3. Matt Piechota
    Linux

    Just works

    Default theme: I do, if it works it's good enough. I change the background and the button location on Ubuntu though. That's just a given. :)

    The main issue I had with Fedora in the past (12 and 13) is the little things that you want for a home desktop. Playing MP3s and movies, and hardware drivers, require downloads or using a thrid party repo. That is annoying since there is an assortment of repos to choose from, each with strengths and weaknesses (and laregly incompatible).

    If anything, that's the Ubuntu advantage. I can install it and it just works for just about anything I need. I run a pile of RHEL machines for work, so I have an affinity for the Redhat way to do things, but at home Fedora was more work than I wanted to assign to it. I'll try F14 though, it might be better.

  4. Adam Williamson 1

    One thing

    One thing I forgot to mention - Ubuntu's going to Unity with 11.04 and Fedora will be going to GNOME Shell with Fedora 15, so there's really no advantage to Fedora if what you want is to stick with a 'traditional' GNOME desktop. The next Fedora release and the next Ubuntu release will both give you some kind of shiny new-age interface by default, it's just a question of which one you want. (I don't recommend making that decision right now, as both GNOME Shell and Unity will change substantially by next April).

    AIUI both F15 and Ubuntu 11.04 will include the old GNOME interface for fallback purposes on systems which can't manage the new composited interfaces, so you should be able to pick the legacy interface on either if you really want to, though it won't be the primary supported interface on either.

  5. Wayne 12

    Drawbacks...

    Briefly mentioning the packaging system difference, and differences in support would be nice for this article.

    Fedora being the redhat distro base, and Ubuntu being the Debian repack. Certainly Redhat was one of the first to become truely noteworthy back a few years, much like Ubuntu has become in recent years, but there are those drawbacks. Deb packages are usually much more readily avialable in my experience for a much larger variety of things, and the support forums for ubuntu...Well, just about any quirk or issue you might run into another user has already gotten, and someone with advanced linux experience has probably provided the solution for.

    So, while I don't think you could loose trying Fedora out, I still wouldn't classify moving to Fedora for those who want gnome out of the box a win-win either.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Perhaps it's time to give KUbuntu a try

    I have KUbuntu, which is your regular Ubuntu but with the KDE environment instead of Gnome, installed in my main desktop machine, and Ubuntu in my netbook. KDE feels a bit crowded with small screens, whereas Gnome minimalism is a good fit for a netbook. I tried the alpha KDE netbook environment a couple of years ago and frankly did not get the point.

    What is essential for me is the abundance of packages available without any need to mess with repositories. I haven't checked Fedora in a long time, because Ubuntu's package manager has kept me happy in the latest four or five years. I don't remember the last time I had to compile from sources

    KDE got a bad reputation with their 4.0 release, but I have to say that the latest KUbuntu is very very good. Still has its oddities, like their default to single click for action instead of the double click, but open the KDE control panel and see how long it takes you to find how to change that -that will give you an idea of the level of customization and flexibility KDE has. Amarok is sadly still trying to catch up to its pre-4 level of functionality, but that's something I can live with.

    Definitely, if you want to stay with Ubuntu and don't like the change of desktop, you should try KUbuntu. It's full of nice details everywhere and well rounded up. In my (limited) experience, you'll have a much easier time if you're switching from Windows using KDE than Gnome.

    And don't forget that using KDE as your desktop environment does not prevent you from installing and running any Gnome application. I regularly use Firefox and Chrome without noticing the difference between desktop environments.

  7. Goat Jam
    Heart

    Wouldn't it be nice

    Was on Redhat up until Redhat 9 but made the move to Ubuntu when Fedora and RHEL parted ways.

    Since then I have come to love deb/apt and hate rpm/yum with a passion. I still have to use it on Centos at work and it blows compared to apt. I can't even set up a simple yum cache FFS.

    So, as much as I dislike the direction that ubuntu is moving in these days and I can sense the time to move is approaching, I cannot bring myself to consider moving back to RPM based Fedora under any circumstances.

    So, at the moment I am still in wait-and-see mode but if push comes to shove I will be going to vanilla Debian or perhaps Linux Mint.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    SELECT title FROM what_a_crap_requirement

    "when it comes to desktop Linux, does anyone use the default theme?"

    Me? Well I do turn off the distracting background, can we just set the damn thing to solid black please? I don't like the short support cycles, other than that it's better than ubuntu, I gave up on that after the pointless "lets innovate by moving the close button from the right to the left!". Ubuntu has its heart set on copying Apple, if the default MacOS background was an image with the words "ubuntu sucks arse" you could safely bet on ubuntu copying it, of course they would innovate by using a brown palette...

  9. viet 1
    Thumb Down

    All fine and good, but...

    did they finally put a definitive end to the misery of pulseaudio ? I'm a big fedora user, since core 2; pulseaudio (included optionally since F8 if I remember well, and active by default since F9) has never, ever worked for me, nor for anybody else I know. We're now 6 main revisions away from inception, and the creeper is still there waiting for someone with enough guts to quash it.

    1. AdamWill
      Stop

      No.

      "We're now 6 main revisions away from inception, and the creeper is still there waiting for someone with enough guts to quash it."

      That, and the fact that every other major distro has adopted it, should probably be a clue to you that it's not going to happen. PA is what we have, get used to it, or write something better.

      1. viet 1
        Boffin

        I already have an easy solution

        # yum remove pulseaudio

        Still, I'd love it to be a bit more automated.

        I don't really understand why almost every distro out there jumped the shark on this. Pulseaudio is a concept with possible interesting applications (like automagically lowering the sound of the movie you're watching if you have a voip call coming through), but real life cases are still so limited that it'd better stay in beta until fully debugged and not be included by default until someone sorts out the unbearable latency issues this POS introduces.

        And, no, I won't do it. Alsa works fine enough for me, thank you.

    2. jtmusky

      Pulse has come along way so far.

      I didn't like pulse-audio at first, it really needed a lot of work then. My buddies would usually remove pulse-audio as one of the first things they did during an install. Now I have been using red hat since 6.1 up to Fedora Core to version 6. That was when I switched to centOS5. I switched only because I was getting tired of tinkering around with fedora to get things to work just right. centOS just worked. Plus having kids took a lot of time too. I tried fedora 9 when it came out, and could not stand it. I ended up frustrated every night just trying to get my sound to work. Now trying Fedora 14 and pulse-audio works right out of the box. I do like the fact I can change volume on separate apps instead of being all linked together. I haven't had any problems with Fedora. :)

  10. Mark 65

    Installers

    "It's also worth mentioning that Fedora still has the best Linux installer I've used, with the option to customize and tweak your installed software before installation. It's something Ubuntu should really consider offering."

    Maybe, maybe not. You did, after all, mention that the two distros are effectively aimed at developers and newbies respectively and therefore that would explain the differences in the installers - as you like it vs. click once. I suppose they could placate people by having a checkbox or something but if they're not targeting those users then it's wasted effort.

  11. Russ Tarbox
    Thumb Up

    I'd never found a Linux distro I liked

    I started using Red Hat back in the late 90s as a server OS, but did play a little with GNOME and KDE. But since then I've never found a Linux distro I liked. Some wouldn't work with basic hardware, Ubuntu pissed me off with being too "idiot-proof" - great if you're a basic user but if you want to do anything non-standard, a complete PITA.

    Recently I downloaded a Fedora Live CD (I had installed MeeGo on this old Dell Inspiron and was trying to persuade the wireless to work) but ended up loving the Live experience so much I dumped Meego and now use it as this old laptop's OS. I've not missed anything from Windows at all. Everything worked. I have all the apps I want (including Spotify under WINE) and have actually enjoyed a Linux distro for the first time.

    I wish I'd found it years ago.

  12. Eddy Ito

    Nail

    You hit it pretty square regarding development and installers. That's why I always keep O'Suzy and the Fed around. It seems like every time I need to compile this or that, some yahuntu has left something important out of the install because it's such a pita to find in Ubuntu and it's ever so much easier to flip to one of the other majors and just spin it out. I pretty much left languid leotard as it wasn't worth the aggravation of re-re-customizing the install. One of these days I'll load up some vms with the miscreant monkey and fed14 to see if a move is warranted.

    1. Jim 59

      Nail

      We don't know what you're on about mate.

  13. Republican
    Linux

    Desktop ready?

    For many years (since the mid ninetees) I try each and every release of the major distro's, including Fedora. Yet for desktop users Fedora still isn't the thing to advise. Ouf the box less hardware works with it and less software (and particularly multimedia too) works, making it more difficult for users who just want to use it.

    The mentioned configurability (being so great in the Fedora installer), when's the last time you tried Slackware for example ?! I know this is not the most common adopted Linux distro, but I still like it nevertheless.

    Personally: for most people Mint Linux works best out of the box: no distro has more hardware working out of the box (and yes: this makes use of proprietary drivers sometimes, so if you don't like that this is not the distro for you), but mostly (as a PC user, not a hard-core developer) it is the only distro to have all media codecs etc in default install to play just about any media that is out on the Internet... easier then that it not possible. (it also has some nice tools for doing certain taks)

    http://www.linuxmint.com/

  14. Anonymous Cowherder
    Linux

    The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

    Another default theme user, apart from changing the desktop wallpaper and ubuntu buttons when I use ubuntu.

    For info, I use ubuntu at home and on my laptop as it is an OS to do home type stuff in. I find fedora a better OS for doing my day job in, it would be nice if there was a little bit more of an attempt to "improve the user experience" and add a little bit of sparkle to the UI, perhaps this will come with gnome 3? Apart from that it has all the tools I need to do my job and the 6 month refresh means that I can play with new features and add to the community if I like stuff or not.

  15. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    As soon as

    Fedora has an equivalent of an LTS release, I'll consider switching.

    I just can't rework my primary systems each time a new release comes out. I don't have the time.

    Mind you, my confidence with Ubuntu has been severely dented recently. I still haven't switched to Lucid yet, because I cannot get suspend/resume or sound working well enough on my trusty Thinkpad T30, things that just worked without problem on Hardy, and my netbook, running Jaunty tells me that there are no further updates for that release. Still, I'll put the netbook remix of Meerkat on that, just to see what it is like.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Welcome

      It has

      > [As soon as] Fedora has an equivalent of an LTS release, I'll consider switching.

      The LTS is RHEL (or one of the rebuilds). And it really is long-term support. How long is it since RHEL5 came out? And how much longer will it be supported? (Ages and ages more, since you ask.)

      I for one will be glad when RHEL6 hits the streets though ...

    2. David Robinson 1

      Fedora LTS

      Fedora does have an LTS release, it's called RHEL. Or there's always CentOS.

  16. Displacement Activity
    Thumb Down

    *Still* no Xen Dom0

    Yet another Fedora release with no Xen Dom0/host support. This has been missing in F9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and now 14, which means that I have to run my server on F8. This is despite the fact that an unofficial Dom0 RPM has been available since at least F12, and probably much earlier.

    I wouldn't mind so much if the reason for this wasn't so blatantly commercial, when Fedora's self-proclaimed mission "is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community". Bollocks. Money talks, and the $107M RedHat paid for Qumranet/KVM is talking pretty loud here.

    1. Jay 2
      Thumb Down

      Wouldn't recommend Fedora as a server OS

      Can't say I know much about Dom0, but given that Fedora is a bleeding edge, 9(ish) month moving goalpost have you considered using CentOS (aka Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the Red Hat)?

      http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/MoveNative2DomU

      I've always seen Fedora as a more desktop-oriented OS. Although it can quite happily do server stuff, the release/support/interest cycle can make life a bit difficult around 2 years of running. Having been forced to use Fedora on servers in the past, it was a joy to be finally able to use RHEL/CentOS.

    2. AdamWill

      Traditionally...

      ...money talking is supposed to work the *other way around* :)

      It's not really a case of money talking so much as everyone who's paid to work on virt for Red Hat actually likes KVM a hell of a lot more. So for Fedora, where no-one's paying 'em to implement anything in particular, KVM is naturally what gets the attention. If someone submits a patch to add dom0 support to Fedora which doesn't have any problems I'm sure it'll get merged.

      1. Displacement Activity

        @AdamWill

        1 - not much room here for technical arguments, but if you want an enterprise-level hypervisor the options are Vmware and Xen: Citrix Xenserver, VirtualIron, Sun SVM, Oracle Virtual Machine and Amazon EC2 are all Xen. No KVM.

        2 - Not sure what you mean about the money. RH paid $107M for Qumranet (ie. KVM), then started dropping Xen. Coincidence? I don't think so. The $107M is doing the talking, and it says that RH wants to move into commercial virtualisation, and it wants to differentiate itself through KVM, and not by simply using the more mature (and GPL'ed) Xen.

        3 - So, how many of the people who are paid to work on virtualisation at RH actually came from Qumranet? And how many of them run datacentres, as opposed to just developing the product?

        4 - the Dom0 support in Fedora has never had problems (no more than anything else, anyway). That's why I (and lots of other people) are still on F8. The issue is that Fedora *unmerged* Dom0 support in F9. This was crazy - why? You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see RH's commercial interests behind this. Anyone using Fedora post-8 now relies on third party RPMs.

        The answer for me personally, in the long term, is probably SLES. Others will hang on till full pvops integration upstream (Fedora 16? RH 10?), at which point you'll have no option other than to support Xen again, whatever RH's long-term roadmap may be.

        1. AdamWill

          Tin foil hat time!

          "1 - not much room here for technical arguments, but if you want an enterprise-level hypervisor the options are Vmware and Xen: Citrix Xenserver, VirtualIron, Sun SVM, Oracle Virtual Machine and Amazon EC2 are all Xen. No KVM."

          What I know about enterprise-level hypervisors you could write on the inside of a matchbox without taking the matches out first, so I'll take your word for it. I thought we sold something which was effectively equivalent to a KVM hypervisor, though.

          "2 - Not sure what you mean about the money. RH paid $107M for Qumranet (ie. KVM), then started dropping Xen. Coincidence? I don't think so. The $107M is doing the talking, and it says that RH wants to move into commercial virtualisation, and it wants to differentiate itself through KVM, and not by simply using the more mature (and GPL'ed) Xen."

          What I meant was that when you start throwing around phrases like 'money talks' you're usually talking about corruption, and that, as I said, works the other way around. It wouldn't be Red Hat *spending* money and changing its approach to something as a consequence: it'd be someone else *paying Red Hat* to change its strategy. Imagine if, for instance, Qumranet had stayed independent but had made a $100m 'donation' to Red Hat, after which all the things you noticed had happened; *that* would be 'money talking'.

          "3 - So, how many of the people who are paid to work on virtualisation at RH actually came from Qumranet? And how many of them run datacentres, as opposed to just developing the product?"

          I don't know. I imagine, to make you happy, the answers would be 'most of them' and 'few or none', though I have no idea how extensively we use virtualization internally.

          "4 - the Dom0 support in Fedora has never had problems (no more than anything else, anyway). That's why I (and lots of other people) are still on F8. The issue is that Fedora *unmerged* Dom0 support in F9. This was crazy - why? You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see RH's commercial interests behind this. Anyone using Fedora post-8 now relies on third party RPMs."

          Well, you kind of do, because taking capabilities out of *Fedora* really doesn't help Red Hat's commercial interests a whole lot; as your post indicates, it's not like we have people locked into Fedora in some way, you can happily just go run SUSE. AIUI the reason dom0 support got de-merged is rather more boring: it's a huge patch that's painful to maintain and it became clear it wasn't going to get upstreamed.

          There is a Fedora feature for restoring dom0 support, BTW - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0 (which as you can see from the page name is about the pvops stuff). I think it was targeted for F13 / F14 for a bit but for some reason it turned out not to fly.

          I dunno, I guess most of what you're saying is pretty much true: Red Hat started off being quite favourable to Xen and after a while we definitely moved over to a strategy based on KVM. Anyone with eyes can see that. But it's just the idea of 'money talks' that doesn't seem to fit in here, to me anyway. So we bought Qumranet; I mean, yeah, but the whole *point* of that is that someone in RH looked at Xen and KVM and decided KVM looked like a better idea, and then the corporate strategists or whoever decides these things figured the best way to pursue a KVM future would be the Remington strategy (we liked it so much, we bought the company). I suppose the only 'conspiracy' angle would be if we decided to buy Qumranet first and then forced KVM on an unwilling public to prop up Qumranet, but why would we do that? It wouldn't make any sense. KVM *was* Qumranet; it doesn't make any sense to spend a ton of money buying the company unless you actually think KVM is awesome and want to work with it anyway. The only other 'evil RH' angle would be if RH was actively stopping Fedora contributors from implementing Xen dom0 support, but AFAIK we really aren't. It's just that the engineers who maintained the dom0 patch for Fedora before were RH engineers and RH doesn't want to do that any more. That's RH's right, after all.

  17. Bristol Dave
    Linux

    Another agreement for Ubuntu "just working"

    I much prefer Ubuntu to Fedora, because as other posters have said, it "just works".

    Fedora's package management sucks. I mean, it really sucks. How many times have we seen yum bork out with failed dependencies? I never, ever get that with apt.

    If you take two identical systems, and put Fedora on one, and Ubuntu on the other, I guarantee that more will work "out of the box" on the Ubuntu system with no fiddling compared to the Fedora one.

    Broadcom wireless drivers are a classic example. Ubuntu 10.10 install just installs the drivers so they work. FC13? Ohhhh no, you have to arse about with fwcutter, for goodness sake, and I really just can't be bothered with it. "Oh, that's because they're closed source", whine the Fedora fanboys. Do you know what? I don't give a toss, and I shouldn't think most users do. I'll be happy if the OS installs whatever works reliably, and I certainly don't care if it's closed source or not.

    In fact, fedora's package management is so bad it's lead to a necessity of apps such as "Autoten", because the OS is so piss-poor at "just working">

    Ubuntu all the way for me, I'm afraid.

    1. AdamWill
      Stop

      Ur doing it rong

      "Fedora's package management sucks. I mean, it really sucks. How many times have we seen yum bork out with failed dependencies? I never, ever get that with apt."

      There's precisely one dependency issue in the entire F14 official repository set. (qtgpsc hasn't been rebuilt against libgps.so.19, if you're wondering). We know. We have tools.

      If you hit any other dependency issue, what this means is that you're doing it wrong. (Okay, okay, or somebody screwed up an update, but with updates-testing we don't get that happening much any more.) Probably by trying to install a package from some other distribution, or from a different Fedora release. The idea that it's 'yum' or 'apt' which has dependency issues is a classic mistake; the dependencies are in the packages. yum and apt just read and apply them. It's extremely simple logic; the package managers don't get it wrong. They just tell you about the consequences of the operation you're trying to do, given the dependencies that exist in the packages you're trying to manipulate.

      "Broadcom wireless drivers are a classic example. Ubuntu 10.10 install just installs the drivers so they work. FC13? Ohhhh no, you have to arse about with fwcutter, for goodness sake, and I really just can't be bothered with it."

      No, you don't. You can install wl from RPM Fusion. (If you're lucky, your card will actually work out of the box, now we provide openfwwf).

      ""Oh, that's because they're closed source", whine the Fedora fanboys. Do you know what? I don't give a toss, and I shouldn't think most users do. I'll be happy if the OS installs whatever works reliably, and I certainly don't care if it's closed source or not."

      Bully for you, but you're kind of missing the point. Fedora's goal is not to do what 'most users' want in the short term. Fedora's goal, and I quote from the mission statement no less!, is "to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community". Making it convenient to install non-free software does not achieve that goal, so Fedora doesn't do it. (Imagine you have the perfect Linux installation, but everything in it is closed source; that would be a pretty Pyrrhic victory, no?)

      You're entirely right in that if what you want is an operating system with everything working right now out of the box whether it uses closed source or not, Ubuntu or another distribution with less strict adherence to the principles of software freedom is somewhat more likely to do that job than Fedora. But you're wrong to imply that this is some kind of failing or stupidity on Fedora's part. We understand exactly the consequences of Fedora's policies, and we're happy with them. We don't mind if it means you don't want to use Fedora, at all, our goal isn't to have everyone in the world running Fedora. But it doesn't mean we're wrong.

    2. AdamWill
      Linux

      On 'giving a toss' about open source:

      http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

      specifically, this quotation:

      "In general, this will all be fine – actually *great* – for folks who have good open source drivers for their graphics hardware. Wayland depends on things they are all moving to support: kernel modesetting, gem buffers and so on. The requirement of EGL is new but consistent with industry standards from Khronos – both GLES and GL will be supported. We’d like to hear from vendors for whom this would be problematic, but hope it provides yet another (and perhaps definitive) motive to move to open source drivers for all Linux work."

  18. Matthew Collier
    Stop

    +1,2,3,4,5 or whatever...

    ...number of people have already said, I can't abide yum, apt has never given me a problem, and the Debain/Ubuntu repos nearly always have what you're looking for, out of the box. That alone is enough to stop me ever considering any non-Debain based distro, except for very specific, targeted purposes! (which usually, are far from the desktop)

    I'm not a huge Gnome fan, run Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) (LTS) at home on the desktop, Linpus Lite on the Aspire One Netbook ('cos I'm lazy and haven't put Ubuntu on it yet), and Ubuntu 10.04 on everything else. To the AC who suggested Kubuntu, I can't believe what a horror show KDE4 (still) is, which means I'm looking at having to switch to Ubuntu, when the time inevitably comes. I'll put that off as long as I can though, 'cos almost everything in Hardy is perfect and functional (as long as you're not after shiny UI effects! ;) )

    Matt.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    What about KDE

    I like KDE.

  20. The New Turtle
    Coffee/keyboard

    Installers

    My Fave distro - Sabayon - moved to the Fedora installer 2 versions ago, and it's been a lottery getting it actually installed ever since. There's nothing clever about it - just always falls over during format and partitioning stage. Darn annoying.

    For the last week I've been running F13 G just to try it after oSUSE 11.3 turned out unstable, and it seems to work OK. The worst part, and probably the deal breaker, is screen font quality. Usually a problem with Linux installs (and also a little with OSX) fonts in F13 just bleed and smudge, making the screen less easy to read. there are settings to adjust how smudgy they are, but they never really crisp up. Yum seems to work fine, and getting hold of the right codecs etc seemed much less hassle than with Ubuntu a couple of generations back.

    I'm tempted to try F14 with KDE 4.5 in the hope that fonts will be better, but I'd rather have a properly working copy of Sabayon 5.4.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm

    I tried it, I liked it, then I tried to get it to do some pretty basic stuff and went back to Ubuntu.

    On the surface, it works really well, looks smooth, and feels very much like Ubuntu (not unexpected because both use Gnome). But,

    # My network card works in Ubuntu. It doesn't in Fedora

    # I sometimes run servers for tinkering purposes. Apache2 on Ubuntu is a doddle. It refused to work on Fedora. I think I know why, but to be honest, I don't care - it made no effort to tell me what the error might be, so why should I make the effort to dig?

    # Wireless keyboard and mouse - work under Ubuntu, no config. Fedora - needed a google hunt

    # A simple update and config of 3 packages I use took nearly an hour, most of which was spent entering the password over and over and over, or checking google for yum errors that apt either dealt with, or at least gave a useful error for. It felt like Vista's UAC all over again.

    So, these are completely random things, purely anecdotal, but I'm afraid Fedora fails for me. I have no doubt all these things could be fixed, but as they all work as soon as you install Ubuntu, I see no reason to waste my time with Fedora. It shows a lot of promise (the installation was good, and the virtualisation stuff was excellent), but I'll wait for a few updates before using it. The lack of usability compared with Ubuntu is rather offputting for me.

    Still, I'd give it 8/10 and showing promise.

    1. AdamWill

      I hate vagueness.

      I really, really do. You would like us to fix these things, right? Then it would help to report on them in a way which makes them at all fixable. It's kind of hard to fix a network card if you don't know what network card it is, or what's wrong with it. Ditto wireless keyboards. I have no idea what would cause you to have to enter 'the password' (what password? User? Root?) 'over and over', so it'd help if you could explain. And, you know, say what the packages were. And what the errors were.

      I'm sorry for the terrible inconvenience, but I'm afraid we haven't quite got the mind reading machine perfected yet. =)

      1. Andy 68
        Pint

        Thank you

        Adam,

        I'd just like to say that I love F13 and 12, and I'm looking forward to loving F14.

        I haven't found a way that I can contribute back to it yet (apart from encouraging my favourite paid-for app to support it), but when I can be arsed, my work machine will be upgrading from 13 to 14.

        Ubuntu to play music and vids at home (although even that's looking less appealing these days) and Fedora for my "I have to get shit done" laptop.

        Cheers.

        (this messgae brought to you by F14 Live)

        1. AdamWill
          Linux

          Thanks!

          That's great to hear.

          There's a ton of ways you can contribute to Fedora. Just filing (usefully detailed :>) bug reports is one. Many of them require little in the ways of specialist skills or large gobs of time.

          Have you seen:

          http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join

          and, from my selfish POV:

          https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join

          the first is the general page on getting involved with Fedora, the second is QA's own page on getting involved with QA. I'm sure you can find something in there that would work for you.

  22. zenkaon

    Debian Squeeze anyone??

    Debian squeeze is now frozen and very very usable. I've been on it for a few months now. Much nicer than ubuntu. All the good debian stuff without the ubuntu fluff. Buttons in the proper place and no MyFace Twatter IM crap integrated into the desktop

    You can be sure that Debian will not force you to use gnome shell or unity, they will simply be an option. If you want gnome 2.30 for the long term, then squeeze is a very good bet.

    Not so bothered about Fedora 14, but very much looking forward to getting RHEL6 on the racks at work to give it a bloody good thrashing and see what it's made of

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