Fedora 11 (Gnome)
Desktop & Apps
Booting into my Fedora 11 desktop was quite pleasant and, as I noted above, fast. The desktop is uncluttered and the default wallpaper is attractive enough albeit rather bland in comparison to what you get with the satanic version of Ubuntu.
If there is a weak area in Fedora then it is with the number of apps included with it by default. Now I’m a bit of a hypocrite here because in the past, in other reviews, I’ve complained about “app overload” where a developers pack in huge numbers of apps and bloat up a distribution unnecessarily.
However, Fedora has gone in the other direction and, frankly, ought to offer more apps installed by default. Here is a list of most of what you’ll find broken down my menu section:
Accessories
Archive Manager
Calculator
Character Map
Indic Onscreen Keyboard
Screenshot
Text Editor
Thesauraus
Graphics
GIMP
gThumb Viewer
Internet
Firefox Web Browser
IM Client
Transmission
Office
AbiWord
Dictionary
Evolution
Programming
OpenJDK Policy Tool
Sound and Video
Audio CD Extractor
Brasero Disc Burner
Chese Webcam Booth
Movie Player
Rhythmbox Music Player
Sound Recorder
There are some system tools available as well but, other than that, this is about what you get with Fedora. OpenOffice.org is missing (which I very much disagree with, it should be in all distributions by default) as are many other useful programs.
The problem, of course, is where do you draw the line with what’s included by default? I really don’t know and that’s one reason why I like the idea of letting users pick the packages they want during the installation process. For some reason this seems to be the exception and not the rule and, frankly, I find it disappointing.
Fortunately it’s quite easy to add additional software via the Add/Remove Software tool. However, this really should not be necessary in the case of must-have applications like OpenOffice.org. Adding apps like that ends up wasting the user’s time and it really should be included by default.
Fedora 11 includes the Firefox 3.5 beta.
(6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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It’s somewhat surprising to see so much difference between a beta and the release code. I’ve talked with other people who’ve had similar difficulties with the beta, all the way to it being uninstallable on reasonably generic machines. Betas are often almost as good as production code anymore, and it’s to the point where if you’re not actually using the package for production, there’s little risk to using it all. But, all’s well the ends well, eh?
I’m also surprised to see them include Abiword rather than OpenOffice. Not that Abiword is a Bad Thing – far from it – but OO has become the MS Office of the F/OSS software world. You’d think that a major player like Fedora would use the major choice of apps.
Hi KG,
That’s very interesting to hear about the beta. I wondered at the time if it was just running it in VMWare but apparently that wasn’t the case.
I totally agree on the quality of betas lately. A lot of them are very, very good. These days alpha software seems to be more what beta software used to be.
I love Abiword too. It’s a great word processor but, at this point in time, OpenOffice.org really is a must have.
This is ironic because I just posted my reactions to the LiveCD over on ET. I too noticed the “thin” application selection, but I thought it was due to trying to jam growing distros on 700 meg CDs.
For example, the PCLOS09 Gnome (which is a very nice distro) simply will not link up wirelessly from the LiveCD and for many people that is enough to reject going any further. But the PCLOS Gnome forum carries an inquiry about the failure of wireless with an Intel 5100 to which a person responds that the drivers for that chip were not included on the LiveCD because space was too tight.
If that is so then perhaps the fedora decision to go lighter on applications makes sense? After all those of us who rely heavily on wireless need those drivers!
Good review Jim and delighted to see you at it! BRAVO!
Hmmmm…good point about the wireless issue, Bill. That’s tough for me to cover since I’m using VMWare usually to do my reviews. Plus it’s a tough one to try to cover in a comprehensive way given everybody’s different wireless setups.
Still, I think there can be some sort of agreed upon minimum standards of apps. Certainly stuff like Gimp, OpenOffice and certain other apps really should be included by default. Otherwise the user has to install them and that shouldn’t be necessary.
And it worries me a bit that a newbie to Linux might be expecting an MS Office type thing and not find anything comparable. It’s available but they might not know it or how to get it. So I like the idea of having it included by default.
Interesting review. I have not actually tried Fedora recently. I believe I did try one of the early releases, but cannot recall which one. I followed the other forks of Redhat called Mandrake, and then PC Linux OS. To me these were just better derivatives.
As to the Open Office thing, I think part of it is definitely the trying to “fit everything on the CD” mentality. Open Office has just become too bloated for me. Even in Ubuntu, I add AbiWord and Gnumeric. They just work better for me.
I agree that it is a bit chunky, tlmck. But I just can’t shake the feeling it should be on there. Maybe dump something else for it? Not sure what but there must be something else that can be gotten rid of to free up space.
Jim, I am really glad this release worked out for you, but with the new filesystem and the other changes that affected the installation, this release just has not worked out for everyone.
Personally in my testing, I was able to run this one Live against an Alpha WAY BACK in January, and I tried the KDE 4.2 implementation and was really impressed with it. However, when I went to install it, I had all kinds of problems, even attempting to install it on systems that already had Fedora 10 installed!
I cannot recall if I tried to install that Alpha, but these problems were with both the Beta and the Preview Release put out the month before the Final.
I got the Final Live version, but did not attempt to install it because I was still hearing reports from others that the disk detection and partitioning section still was not working correctly – possibly due to the ext4 file system configuration changes, possibly due to boot manager changes, possibly due to device detection algorithms affected by the other changes. Not sure of the reason, but I am sure that it has been a problem – at least for some. I do hear that the DVD edition has better success, and that, with perseverance, it is still possible to get it all working, but that taints the otherwise stellar impressions it gave in the Live Edition.
Boot performance on several of the newer versions that use the two most recent kernels and a reorganization of the order of events in the initial run levels have really helped initial startup.
I’ve seen at least two reviews of apt versus yum performance comparisons, though, and in spite of yum performance claims, yum still greatly lags Debian apt in overall performance.
The two areas where Fedora consistently seems to lead the pack are in Virtualization and Security Enhanced features. These are the hallmarks of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions, and Red Hat definitely invests heavily and personally into the Fedora project to make certain that their interests in these technologies are met in Fedora.
To me, those are the two reasons one would primarily want to work with Fedora, and the other reasons are also associated with Red Hat product family familiarity. In terms of speed, reliability, selection of applications, and general home use, I can think of at least five other distributions that personally serve me better: sidux, Debian, antiX, SimplyMEPIS, and PCLinuxOS. I could add more: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandriva Cooker, and maybe even gOS. I’d put openSUSE behind Fedora. It is slower, more buggy, less cutting edge, and the most fickle OS on my hardware, and I just have not cared to become familiar enough with the quirks to work them out. Fedora? I would, but it still would not be my personal every day desktop system.
Okay, Brian. We’ll put you in the “maybe” category for using Fedora as your main OS at some point.
Jim,
I believe the DVD installer offers further installation of applications. I cannot confirm this as I have installed using the Live CD too. I would hesitate to recommend this distro to new users though. Since they do not offer non-free software in the repos the average new user would have to go searching to add rpmfusion and livna repos. However, overall Fedora 11 has been rock solid with my testing and very fast.
Masinick,
You most likely ran into the issue of Fedora defaulting to ext4 FS and Grub not being patch to boot from ext4. I believe this issue has been resolved and by default the installer creates and ext3 /boot partition along with an ext4 / LVG.
Thanks for the tip Maximus. That’s really good to know.