TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Fedora, and Redhat before it, has held a special place in my heart for years, being that Redhat Desktop was the very first Linux distribution I ever used, and the one I kept coming back to during my programming classes in college.

We've been estranged in recent years since I was seduced by the Debian-like crowd, and a spotty release record hasn't helped me regain my confidence. In fact, so unimpressed was I with release 10 that I completely ignored release 11 (a fact that I just now noticed).

Hopefully this version will make a more memorable impression. I downloaded the GNOME live CD for my initial run-through.

UPDATE - Adam Williamson, former Mandriva Community Manager and such a frequent commenter on my rants that he might as well be my correspondent in the field, has responded to some of the issues I had below. Thanks, Adam.

Install:

The dueling scrollbars from previous releases are still here. The actual installer window looks about the same as its ancestors as well. I don't mind sticking with something that works, but I'm a little surprised. Fedora generally likes to give everything a fresh facelift with each release.

The installer for the Gnome live CD doesn't really give you any customization options whatsoever past the point of picking your partition. This is about on par with Ubuntu. Whatever is on the live disc gets copied verbatim to your drive. I assume the DVD is different.

Reboot brought me to the Welcome wizard. I set up my user and set the date and time, then declined to send my hardware specs. I logged in and was met with the default desktop.

Note the spatial window setting that immediately got axed. Fedora is the only distribution I know of that still insists on pushing spatial window browsing on their users.

MP3 support wasn't installed, as is standard for Fedora and Ubuntu. Mandriva and Slackware pull it off somehow. I still find it odd that the others can't (or won't) follow suit.

According to Adam, there really is no "official" way that Mandriva had for handling MP3 support; they just did it and hoped they wouldn't get sued. So far it's worked out. I can't speak with authority on this, but I'd guess that's also the way Slackware handles it.

Java 1.6 was installed, but not GCC. To Fedora's credit, it did ask me if I'd like to install gcc when it couldn't find the command. I went ahead and said yes at the prompt just to see what it did. I was a bit surprised when I wasn't asked for a password.

Fedora 12 just installed gcc with a couple of key strokes. It was both convenient and insecure at the same time. I wasn't sure if I had a residual permissions grant from having run Add/Remove before or this was just a general security bug.

After looking around, and apparently this "feature" is a point of contention among the Fedora user community. I can see why people would be upset.

Since the initial launch of Fedora 12, there's been some rumblings in the Redhat forums. It looks as though that lovely little insecurity feature is getting fixed. It was part of what was supposed to be a larger change to the way permissions were handled, and for whatever reason only this part was shipped, without much of a heads up for the end users. Props to Redhat for patching it for now until they can release what they originally intended.

Software Selection:

Firefox and AbiWord were installed, but no graphics editor to speak of. Following in the footsteps of Ubuntu Karmic, Empathy is the IM of choice.

I was pleased to see that some games were included on the live CD install, although their selections seem a bit haphazard. I noticed that certain standard Gnome games were missing, which made me wonder if A.) They had finally broken off each game into its own individual package and B.) I could play around with their selections myself.

I ran software update before I played with anything. The Add/Remove program UI leaves something to be desired. Showing the descriptions in bold and the name of the program underneath isn't the best presentation, in my opinion. Especially for someone who knows what programs they like, it's confusing to see stuff like "The classic Crack-Dot-Com game" rather than "Abuse."

I eventually found the "gnome-games" package (not under Gnome, but under Games) but there didn't seem to be any option to select individual games. I'm a little confused as to how Fedora managed to install some but not all of the standard Gnome games. I'm sure I'll get email about this.

Conclusion:

Fedora 12 wasn't the grand leap forward I've come to expect. Generally the Fedora crew tend to surge forward with new and interesting things with little regard to little details like stability, but aside from the "anyone can install anything" feature I didn't see much of interest in this release. I can give them credit that their package manager worked for me this time, although it's not the easiest to use.

The parts of the OS I played with were stable enough, just not terribly inspiring. I expected more out of the Fedora crew. I know I've criticized them for leaping before they look with new features in the past, but being too conservative makes people lose interest in your distribution. Or, at least it does for me. I may not want to run Fedora as my main OS, but if it's got some whiz-bang feature I like playing with I'll throw it on a spare partition. This version didn't have that.

Adam Williamson did have a bit of a rebuttal to my "nothing to see here," in the form of the release notes for F12. Fair enough. Things were done in this release, but from a strictly end-user perspective there was nothing high profile enough for me to notice, and I find that unusual for Fedora.