Fedora 13 - Ubuntu's smart but less attractive cousin Number 13 is indeed an unlucky number for the next release of Fedora. Unfortunately for this popular distro, its beta arrives at almost the same time as the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. The Fedora 13 beta could get eclipsed by Ubuntu 10.04, later this month, because it lacks some of the flashy new features found in …
WHY do we have to have 'flashy features'? The first thing I do is switch off all the 'fade effects' and other annoying 'bling', but increasingly Linux is becoming a clone of Windows when it comes to animating everything. KDE4 still does not have the ability to make it look like 'classic KDE' even with the 'improvements' in 4.4. If one is USING a computer to do REAL work, then you do not need to wait for a new window to fade in, or even more annoying in SUSE - bounce around the place before it can be read!
It is about time we had a simple standard 'theme' without any bling that simply works and does it job :)
Erm, you don't have to have flashy, new features. You've said it yourself: you can turn them off. Ubuntu has the bling because it is in direct competition with Windows and OSX and needs to look as pretty. Fedora has a different target market.
If you really want to 'do REAL work', you can. FFS, you could even just use a terminal window or even do without windows managers altogether. And if you're so incensed by the lack of a standard theme, write one! :)
If you have a modern GPU with OpenGL support, this is almost exclusively handled there (fading, bouncing, wobbling etc.)
Unless you've harnessed your GPU to do calculations, you've probably got ample spare cycles there.
I leave Compiz on on my laptop, jut to try to get people to notice it to increase user awareness of Linux. It doesn't really chew up a lot of CPU cycles on my lowly 2GHz Pentium 4 Thinkpad T30 unless you are using rapidly changing pixmaps (like video), and I don't normally do this when I am working.
The ATI MobileRadion in this Thinkpad is not up to water or flame backgrounds, but it runs a mean desktop cube.
Lots of people (or some anyway) have been moaning that the Ubuntu brown look is to boring , and wanted it jazzed up , probably want it look like Windows.
Me - I don't care what it looks like when i install it, I can and do put
some nice wallpaper over it.
Here is some one who looks nice too.
I agree with Lester about eye candy and bling. It's worth pointing out that if one does not like KDE4 or Gnome2, there are other window managers available. XFCE and ICEWM are way faster than KDE or Gnome and are quite functional too.
Nothing forces a Linux user to use Gnome or KDE.
"""It's worth pointing out that if one does not like KDE4 or Gnome2, there are other window managers available. XFCE and ICEWM are way faster than KDE or Gnome and are quite functional too. Nothing forces a Linux user to use Gnome or KDE."""
Yup, Fluxbox is amazing, and even supports accelerated window transparency, if that's your kind of thing.
"""Of course, Fedora has never stopped you from using closed, proprietary drivers, but this is the first time that an open-source solution has been available on the platform."""
Is that why I had to struggle with disabling these crappy drivers on my Fedora 11 desktop at work? I had never used the modprobe blacklist before, since on all my real (Slackware, where everything is easier, and you never have to look at a configuration wizard) computers I compile my own kernels, I compile in everything that I need, and disable everything I do not. I have learned my lesson about compiling custom kernels on package-managed distros, though, so I'm sticking with the default crap on this computer. This Neuveau driver (Which is in the highly experimental section of kernel modules) was the probable cause of a pretty significant memory leak in my X server, which decided to use all 4gb of ram in my desktop after just a month of uptime. I don't use Linux so that I have to reboot monthly.
I agree with you, up to a point. Excessive "bling" is pointless, say for the sake of showing off, but there is a point to many of these fade-effects. They tend to make things look "smooth" without actually hurting productivity or responsiveness. And things looking "smooth" makes people feel like they are working on a "smooth" environment, which has more of an effect on people than you appear to realize.
Like: a 50ms fade-effect will make a menu popup look a lot more "smooth" without actually having a negative effect on your efficiency. (Anybody who claims a 50ms delay for a menu is hurting his productivity is either lying, or seriously needs to unplug every now and then.)
And I, despite having serious doubts, found that the "new" Desktop Cube thing that Compiz offers is quite useful. I tend to switch between desktops a lot, and "Mouse5+Mouse1+Drag" is usually faster, in my case, than "Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right".
And, finally, If these basic smoothing effects are having a noticeable effect on the performance of your computer... try a computer built this side of the new millennium! The medium settings on Ubuntu's Gnome desktop effects (I forget what it's called... I use KDE) shouldn't have any effect on your "efficiency" and should run effortlessly on any computer with so much as a AGPx8 compatible GPU. (And yes, I have tested that claim.)
But hey, if you want your desktop to look like a Win 3.1 equivalent, that is your call. Most people, I reckon, would rather it looked like OSX or Win7.
Never mind that Fedora is first and foremost a community project from which Redhat takes updates into it's Enterprise Linux, the flagship being RHEL for Servers.
Ubuntu is targetted at a different audience and needs different stuff like bloody social crap apps. Why people need the internet to be social is still beyond me, but what gives.
Thusly, it may be sad in the eye of a poor journalist, but Fedora is meant to be for contributors: big on server packages, less worried with the everyday user. Besides, as everyday user, would you want an update of the *complete* OS every 6 months? Which, if not completely normally installed, will fail even when using the preupgrade stuff? (I tried several times (10->11, 11->12) and the only success I could have with preupgrade is with baremetal install... Inside a VMware VM, the preupgrade simply fails more often than not. Nevermind the dual boot, and whatelse bootscenario you might come up with... This is not good for Joe Everydayuser.)
Mine's the one with the Fedora Pocketbook in the well... pocket!
Wait, wait, isn't the purpose of an OS with GUI to make it easy for the user?
The difference between Ubuntu and Fedora 13 is just a few social networking apps - which can be easily installed on Fedora or uninstalled on Ubuntu.
I can't see the logic of making an OS less attractive for its potential user, just to satisfy a minority of geeks (who - anyway - compile their systems from scratch).
"the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora 13 is just a few social networking apps - which can be easily installed on Fedora or uninstalled on Ubuntu."
sounds like you haven't looked at ubuntu 10.04. the gui is now much more polished than the average Gnome and icons are more consistent. ubuntu software centre has advantages over synaptic including managing your own ppa's. the notification system too is very welcome addition. canonical are beginning to really add value to the stock gnome offering.
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Fedora's 'holier than thou' attitude is a large reason why we now *have* a good open source version of Java. It's also the reason a good open source NVIDIA driver now exists, and the reason for all sorts of other F/OSS software that exists now that didn't before, and never would have if all distros had just said 'oh, fine, we'll just ship something proprietary then'.
You're welcome!
"Not letting mp3 files be played from install"
That has nothing to do with a 'holier than thou attitude' and everything to do with the patents on decoding MP3.
"Not to mention their nasty bias towards Gnome"
Er, what's 'nasty' about it? We pick a default desktop and go with it. It's not as if anyone's trying to hide this.
"forcing everyone to install worlds of unwanted Mono programs."
Wait, what? First you're talking about a holier than thou attitude to freedom, now you're moaning about Mono? Within the space of five lines? A little consistency, please!
Ironic that you can accuse people of having "holier-than-thou attitude with open source software" and "forcing everyone to install worlds of unwanted Mono programs". In my experience real FOSS evangelists want as little to do with Mono as possible.
So either (a) you're talking about two different sets of people and I've got confused.
(b) you're talking about one set of people and they're confused
(c) you're confused.
And now this post to confuse everyone even further. Hope that helps.
I have used Fedora since version 3 and at no point have I had that crap Mono forced onto me. I check after each install and it is not there. When I download packages I carefully check to ensure Mono is not part of them and it is not.
If Mono is being snuck into Linux then it is at the hands of GNOME. I have probably managed to steer clear as I use KDE.
Ubuntu on the other hand INSTALLS MONO BY DEFAULT - because of GNOME.
MP3's are another matter. The reason for not allowing them to be played from install is due to the licensing. The MP3 codec is patented so a license is required for companies who sell in the US for US customers. As Red Hat are a US company they would need to buy a license. They won't because there are better standards out there. As far as I know Canonical DID buy a license. At the end of the day Fedora do not stop you from playing MP3's, you just have to download the codec and that takes less than 2 minutes so stop crying and be a man.
Fedora is primary a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it is not allowed to flow too far away from its main sponsor. That is why you will never see all those fancy newbie stuff.
If you test and develop software to be run on RHEL, having latest builds of fedora around is a must.
I've worked with linux for 10 years and only seen RHEL and SLES(Suse) being demanded by enterprise customers, thats why I've never ever bothered learning the inns and out of Ubuntu although it may look and feel fabulous. Canonical is nowhere near the reach Redhat have in the enterprise world, or its free rebuilds like Oracle Unbreakable and CentOS that we use because RHEL is too expensive.
"Fedora is primary a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it is not allowed to flow too far away from its main sponsor. That is why you will never see all those fancy newbie stuff."
This angle is overplayed. That's not what Fedora is. Red Hat also doesn't entirely control Fedora, so Red Hat really can't 'not allow' people to add useful apps. With the current Fedora process, it'd be entirely possible for an app to go from not being in Fedora to being included in the default desktop spin without anyone @redhat.com having to be actively involved, or even give approval, at any stage.
Fedora really isn't 'primarily' a 'testing ground' for RHEL. It's a desktop Linux distribution whose development is sponsored by Red Hat. It is the upstream for RHEL, that's not the same thing as being a 'testing ground', and Fedora has a distinctly different focus in terms of usage from RHEL. Fedora is *not* a server distribution, no-one would really recommend you run production servers on Fedora. Fedora is more aimed at desktop use. In a sense it's intended to be the desktop that someone who pilots RHEL servers might use, maybe, but that's just a rough approximation.
Fedora has tons of apps and features aimed at being useful to the desktop user. The inclusion of the Shotwell photo management app in this release, for instance, which is mentioned in the release documentation, is hardly a feature of interest to your average server maintainer. =) Nor is 3D support for NVIDIA graphics cards.
Fedora devs contribute extensively to the development of GNOME, and of tools such as system-config-printer (for printer management), gnome-color-manager (for color management), upower (power management)...Fedora has tons of devs working on features that are of direct interest to desktop users.
Fedora 13 includes a new social networking app, much as Ubuntu does; it just hasn't been as aggressively promoted. We chose Vino rather than Gwibber, due to Gwibber's rather heavy dependency on Ubuntu's cloud stuff.
you guys dont get it do you?
linux devs want it to appeal to everyone. the market they are after is the home user and business. business will take a while due to migrations being a painful process and senior management usually wanting to stick with what they KNOW. but home could be much sooner. the average PC enthusiast etc and people not wanting to buy windows
average joe wants things to look nice (ubuntu still looks shite to me and dont say install a different desktop - if its not like this out of the box average joe is turned off by now) and now people are playing with win7 linux really needs to up the game. vista looked ok but was unstable and buggy. win7 is a dream to use over vista and is much fater too.
also what do you guys THINK average joe uses a pc for? coding? most average joes want to view internet, print photos, do some minor office work (basic spreadheets for accounts etc), gaming and socialising. like it or not that is what 99 of HOME users use PCs for.
yes, its faster than windows, yes its more stable. is it more user friendly? hell no. thats the issue. even as a techie i cant get into linux, too many command line options to do things it just turns people off - the last thing i want to do when i get home is tinker with PCs, i use them 9 hours a day at work and at home i just want usability. linux needs to ape windows a certain amount as that is what people use and know. they arent interested in learning how to install and auth via command lines are other crap like that.
linux is still miles behind on a simple user experience. and for new features to be 'oooh it installs my printer - wow' is a joke. windows has been able to do this for 10+ years now.
Citizen Kaned, I'll agree with you on pretty much everything you've said except your last point. I don't agree that linux, Ubuntu specifically, is that far behind at all. Ubuntu 9.10 is great and installs so easily, I prefer it over any flavor of windows. As a long time lnux user I've come to appreciate that with every new release there is less hacking I have to do to get the system configured the way I want it. I have found windows to be an absolute nightmare in regard to drivers and unrecognized devices and when I install Ubuntu on the same hardware it has no problems supporting everything as is. Granted that has been my specific experience and will vary for others depending on the specific hardware. If by chance there is a problem, there is plenty of info on the web to help you get it fixed. For the few things you still can't do onUbuntu there are plenty of free hypervisors available so you can run XP or 7 if you absolutely have to.
For the record, I've been windows free for my home systems for over five years!
every linux install ive done has been a pain in the arse. usually with wireless drivers and the like. not to mention failing updates etc
maybe im just windows indoctrinated.
for the record i just bought my first copy of windows. win 7 64bit. by far the best windows ive had the pleasure of using.
maybe its my complete hatred of wasting my precious home time (dont care about wasting time at work lol) means i just dont like playing with hardware at home.
...was your last Linux install.
I've put Hardy and Jaunty on lots of systems, and generally it just works.
Almost every wireless card I've used (and I've got many rattling around in drawers at home) is recognized without need of a vendor supplied installation disk.
The last problem I had was the hacked Atheros chipset in my EeePC 701 with Hardy (fixed by a specific module from the community), but by the time Jaunty came along, it worked without problems.
What impressed me recently was when I took my mule system, and replaced the motherboard, which resulted in different processor, support chipsets, graphics adapter, memory, network - well pretty much everything besides the wireless card (it's a deskside system some distance from the core of the home network) and the media peripherals.
The existing Hardy install (yes Ubuntu 8.04 - two years old, but kept up to date) barely batted an eyelid. It recognized the onboard Nvidia graphics (it previously had an ATI AGP card), asked to install the correct driver for it, and came up as if nothing had changed. It just coped with the fact that the support chips changed from a VIA set to an Nvidia nForce set, or that the processor changed from an AMD Athlon XP to a Pentium Dual Core.
The last time I did this with Windows XP, I had so many problems, mainly because the Windows 'you've changed your machine, are you still entitled to run Windows' checks caused me to have to call Microsoft to re-authorize the retail version of XP (which is allowed to be moved between systems as much as you want). And the specific IDE drivers for the original motherboard refused to let me access the optical drive to enable me to load the correct ones from the driver CD packaged with the new motherboard to fix the problem.
I've not used Vista, but have built a Windows 7 system last Christmas. I was genuinely impressed by how easy it was to install, and it is clearly a step change from XP, The install I did was on pretty much generic hardware, so I would hope that it would be quite easy.
But comparing the installs of Linux and Windows is largely bogus, because almost nobody outside of the technical community actually installs Windows on any system. They buy it pre-installed, and just use it until it becomes so cluttered and slow that they discard the whole system. To somebody who has never installed a system, it will always be a traumatic operation to partition their disk and install a completely foreign OS with no experience of building systems. This probably explains many of the 'tried it, found it so difficult that I just switched back to Windows' type of comments.
Many of these people would find a second or third install so trivial compared to the first that they would change their view.
"linux is still miles behind on a simple user experience. and for new features to be 'oooh it installs my printer - wow' is a joke. windows has been able to do this for 10+ years now. "
I can install a new linux system and pick up the hardware and update to the latest builds of open office and a browser in a fraction of the time it takes to install windows. BOTH have problems with some hardware, but windows now has increasing problems doing things that were off the shelf even as far back as W98SE. I can't install multiple graphics cards nowadays on windows - I either drop back to W98SE, or I load a new build of Linux.
I'm now running Linux on all my main development machines - it's simply more stable than the windows machines ever were ....
what fraction thats a bit vague ;) ? i had to install win7 the other day. about 25 mins, which isnt bad considering it was clean install over the 32bit version
now, if it just asked if i wanted to keep windows.old it would be much quicker lol (no i dont as i am capable of backing up myself lol)
maybe i should have another go but linux simply doesnt do what i want it to do AT HOME (or much of what i do at work) and running in a hypervisor seems a clat (tried to install wine on linux last year - what a ball ache that was and it never worked)
another problem with linux seems to be all the distros, its too confusing to the lay man (and none-linux techies in general) all the different installers etc. (of course windows is playing catch up with all its stupid versions now too) and the naming of apps. if i want to send an email i have to go and click on an app called squirtypigeon or whatever instead of something called email etc.
What, 25 min? That's horrible.
You know you only installed the OS there, right? You are a techie, you say? I'm not, but I seem to know better than you, because when I install Linux (Ubuntu in the past few years) I notice that it installs way more than the OS. Plus it configures all the hardware that is on at the time. My ancient computer (~8 year old) at home is running Kubuntu 9.10 and, funny thing, I haven't had to use the command line for anything "home-ish" (when I code or remote log into work machines, than I do use the CLI, but that's by choice).
By that time, I'm afraid you're still looking for the "manufacturer CD" with the drivers to your device, which is what that little box that popped up when you plugged your hardware asked for. And the Photoshop and/or Illustrator CD. And the Office CD. And download Firefox. Etc. Whatever I have to install after the OS (like Inkscape) because it's not in the default CD image is easily done in the dummy friendly software management programs. No need to go hunt for downloads or disks.
Now, if you play computer games, then you will have to keep making MS richer, I'm afraid. (although some people claim to run Windows games on Linux, I myself don't know and couldn't care less, because I don't waste time with games; I waste time with other stuff)
Windows is too hard to use -- I am lost any time I sit in front of a colleagues machine that is running it (my last Windows use was in 2000) -- only thing worse is when I have to use a Mac. See? Your opinion (as mine) about the "ease" is wrong, and irrelevant.
25mins is pretty good actually, you do get a lot of non-core OS with Windows (media centre, in some versions, for instance). I installed MythDora last night, it took over an hour and a half for the OS and the minimal extra apps to install from the CDs (2 off) then nearly an hour for the "yum upgrade mythtv", now it's not the fastest machine in the world (VIA C7 1300MHz), but has plenty of RAM and a fairly good HDD.
Last time I installed a not-just-released version of Fedora on my AA1 (my main Linux box), it took a good two hours for the OS to install, followed by having to leave it overnight for the "yum update". I really don't buy the really fast speeds people quot for installs of Linux, I have never seen these, even on the high end Proliants at work. (Come to that, I don't buy really fast speeds for Windows either...)
Can't say about Fedora but I've installed OpenSUSE 11.2 5 times in the last few months. As expected the faster systems were faster but a fresh 64-bit DVD install on a new HD dual core E5300 pentium with 2GB memory took 25mins including most apps etc. The oldest system an AMD64 took ~40mins.
Updating in each case took ~30mins but that's dependent on the time since release of the DVD.
fedora
Installed version 6 as a complete newb, surprised to find after the install that everything did just work.
Adding a few extra such as the nvidia closed source driver and the beryl desktop were a doddle and I ended up with a system that made vista users look sick
I still use winxp though... if only for gaming.
Oh well off to pray to the valve gods that they bring out Steam for linux.............
I use Fedora on my AA1 because the linux of choice at work is RHEL, it means that I don't need to learn a whole bunch of different commands or locations for different parts of the OS, while at the same time I get a bit more of an end user orientated OS. I also use MythDora as my MythTV distro for the same reason.
seems to run fine on my old vaio lappy. have got to look into why it's not playing movies : it just fails horribly when i try to load them... that said, I'm a Linux n00b who could do with investigating it some more as to why, but doesn't know exactly where to look.. but it's mostly working the way I'd expect. And, yes, it's prettier than the brown ver.
and there's always the GF's laptop with 7 on it if i can't sort the avi codecs etc out.. :)
The recommended method is preupgrade:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
though there's a rather icky bug where that will fail for most F11-F12 and most F12-F13 cases because the /boot partition is too small (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#preupgrade-default-boot ).
The other option is, as you thought, yum, which isn't technically supported but usually works okay. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum provides general instructions and also specific caveats for particular version upgrades; there'll be notes on the f12-f13 upgrade at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Fedora_12_-.3E_Fedora_13 .
>every linux install ive done has been a pain in the arse. usually with wireless drivers and the like. not to mention failing updates etc
Long gone are the days of having to compile in madwifi with each kernel release. Wifi is now largely seemless on linux (thank the netbooks for that) unless perhaps if you are using a bad offbrand card.
>maybe im just windows indoctrinated.
People always go with what they know and I am so glad I have forced myself to be exposed to virtually every operating system written in the last 30 years (hobby of mine, Plan 9 and Haiku, but most of all VMs ftw).
>for the record i just bought my first copy of windows. win 7 64bit. by far the best windows ive had the pleasure of using.
Yes even have a box running this and agree the latest Vista SP mascarading as an OS finally got it right three years late. If not for the forced DRM and forced Windows Disadvantage malware crap might actually be a somewhat respectable OS (no wait IE malware portal still embeded in OS - the all time dumbest OS move and what happens when marketing and accountants start giving input to developers).
>maybe its my complete hatred of wasting my precious home time (dont care about wasting time at work lol) means i just dont like playing with hardware at home.
Which dumb IT person accidentally gave the beloved El Reg link to his clueless Manager of Information Systems. In the States I remember there were three types of students in computer science classes, CS students who once weeded out the chaf usually wrote fairly elegant code, CS/EE students whose code while less elegant was usually very functional and MIS students whose code either wouldn't compile at all or was elegant due to being rich trust fund babys who would pay CS students to write their code for them. Now many years into the real world I realize it is not how good your code that determines your rank in an IT org but how can you outlast everyone else by eating crap and being a yes man. IT is like a tree full of monkeys, nothing but aholes looking up and nothing but smiles looking down.
Linux is linux so distro difference far less than people make out ,once you learn a bit how everything is put together. Still who the hell would use Fedora for anything but a development test environment? If you want stability go RHEL or RHEL based (Centos, etc.). If you want features, the latest code, and usability there are about a dozen distros better than Fedora IMHO.
"Now many years into the real world I realize it is not how good your code that determines your rank in an IT org but how can you outlast everyone else by eating crap and being a yes man."
Isn't the "yes man" and "eating crap" classes part of the MIS degree anyway? I'll take a field-working CS-type for an IT Manager than an MIS person any day, since they actually have a concept of how things can work, rather than reading marketing hype to make their decisions for them.
Fedora is a creative community. Fedora has perhaps 15 million more users than does Canonical, the secretive, private corporation. RHEL users are not counted in the Fedora figure, nor are Ubuntu statistics (not released). Fedora is not "less atrractive" except to the superficial. It "fronts" for a Linux corporation that will do a billion USD this year. Redhat reports earnings, unlike Canonical.
Ubuntu is a creatively parasitic organization, having taken over Debian for the interests of the aging Space Boy.
Pardus is a Linux community that is independent. It does without fanfare or deceit what Ubuntu claims to do. Pardus 2009.1 is stable, unlike Ubuntu's releases of late.
Slackware is a one-man band and the gold standard for Linux. It allows complete freedom and encourages education, something for which Ubuntu is not noted.
If Ubuntu is "more attractive" than Fedora, then one supposes that the author would claim Windows is even "more attractive" than Ubuntu.
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