Submitted by Using the default Gnome desktop, Fedora 9 generally felt solid and polished. Previous versions of Fedora have generally been hit or miss in this respect, so it’s good to find a Fedora release that actually feels like a stable one,
says Techiemoe. DesktopLinux has a mini-interview about Fedora and some additional info too.
Two More Fedora 9 Reviews
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I especially like the opportunity to easily switch between the latest Gnome and KDE DE’s. I was suprised with an usable KDE 4.0.
Many thanks to each and everyone who made this lovely bleeding edge gemstone possible.
If you like the KDE 4 on Fedora 9 experience, you might also want to read
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/14/fedora-9-and-the-road-to-k…
Other new features:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/ReleaseSummary
I tried Fedora 8 not long ago and really liked “the Red Hat way” so I’m sure I’ll be trying Fedora 9 soon, too. As someone else suggested, though, I rather wish they’d offer a not-quite-bleeding-edge spin as well as the very latest beta stuff. From what I’ve read of the reviews, usability does take a hit (until some upstream or third-party packages have caught up, and for some of us the Livna/multimedia repo stuff too). One of the nice things about my current distro, Debian Testing, is that it works so well I don’t even notice I’m using an OS any more.
A really good OS should be invisible, imho, and if it isn’t then a rough edge is sticking out somewhere. On Linux, the rough edges tend to be beta stuff or poor user interfaces. On Windows, it’s Microsoft telling you what you can or can’t do ‘cos, you know, we own you. The nice thing about the betaware is that it gets debugged soon enough. The other stuff needs a complete head transplant. I know which one I prefer.
They do, it’s called Fedora 8.
Yes, I was waiting for someone to fall into that trap, as you’ve obligingly done. A better comparison would be to something like Debian Testing vs Unstable. Or, launch with stuff that is is slightly less bleeding edge, then release upgrades when the betas or RCs go gold and when third-party support has caught up. I do realize that the latest and greatest is one of the points of Fedora, but I’m looking at this from the angle of usability. It seems to be that there is now so much competition in the Linux world that poor usability will increasingly run the risk of being punished by the market. An example would be Firefox 3, also used by Ubuntu. Yes, nice to have, but if your favourite extensions haven’t yet been issued for v3, perhaps not so nice to have.
The irony is that while Linux as a whole is becoming more and more complete and polished, the race between distros to stand out means that some are, in fact, becoming less polished and complete.
If an invisible OS is what you want maybe Fedora isn’t quite what you’re looking for.
Fedora might actually end up being the exact opposite of that. New things pop up all the time for you to toy with, new things show up in menu’s, things get switched around sometimes, and yes bugs happen.
Then again you never know. I have less trouble with fedora than my XP machine.
I have been using Red Hat since 6.0 Professional and I really had no clue back then to what I was doing with it other than I liked it.
I had Fedora 8 and it got wiped out and Fedora 9 installed with a Volume Group divided up separately and encrypted really cool. I finally understand SELinux and the concepts after my RHCE class, cert and LOTS of hours studying in my free time.
Upstart has taken the place of the old inittab structure, the firewall rules are different, tons of new graphical tools. It is just awesome, I have it on my work laptop now, other home machines and fixing to load up my workstation with it wiping off RHEL5.1…
Actually some of the features are in RHEL5.2 that was just released and I have downloaded the ISO images from RHN and getting ready for installation tomorrow.
FireFox 3 works like a dream, I have to say it gets better and better. RHEL6.0 will be light years ahead, I never thought a hobby could earn me a living….
I tested Fedora 9 for a few days. It is – being such a bleeding edge distribution – unstable (the best thing was the script abcde which brought my whole system to its knees …). It is sluggish. It is very new and has all the bells and whistles of a very, very new distribution.
I’ll stick to Debian Lenny that is – even in its testing stage – much more mature and stable than Fedora will ever be. But then Fedora is only the testbed for Red Hat enterprise distributions.