Fedora 11 beta was released last week so I decided to give Fedora another shot to win me over. It looked really good as a live cd so I thought why not do a clean install. The installer is apparently broken as it failed on writing to the partitions I created. At first I thought that maybe this was because I tried to use Ext4 for the /home partition, so I rebooted and tried to install again this time using ext3 for the /home partition but still it was a no go. Chalk it up to beta. So I thought why not give Fedora 10 another shot? Previously when I had tested it NetworkManager was broken, it would not allow me to set up a static ip address and the updates hadn't fixed that yet. This issue was not reported by the many reviews done by various Linux magazines I had read recently so I thought maybe this issue had been cleared up, well it hasn't been! Here are the issues I have after just using Fedora 10 for a day.
1. NetworkManager still broken, but wireless driver support was outstanding.
2. No GUI to configure the Login Manager or GDM, actually it is not configurable. From what I read on their forums you can go back to the GDM from Fedora 8 for a fix.
3. Privileges! I tried to copy some themes Clearlooks-Cairo-Bigpack to /usr/share/themes only to be faced with permission errors. Now I first tried alt + f2> gksu nautilus but gksu is not installed, nor sudo so then I opened a terminal changed to root user and tried launching nautilus from there which worked but then I got errors when trying to drag and drop, this is the first time I have seen permission errors for root, ever! It's root for gods sake! Using the command line command cp resulted in failure also ..."omitting file" errors...So I added my user to other groups such as adm and users. No go again! Lets see what else can I do? Disabled selinux, reboot still won't work.
4. Codecs installation. Lets try Adobe Flash...go to youtube...no flashplayer installed, lets get the latest from Adobe...download...double click .rpm and I had to provide the root password THREE times to install the codec! Now this is AFTER I have already done a system update so I know it isn't a bug. The yum codec from Adobe failed to install which is why I used the .rpm. It DID install though but I had to restart Firefox several times to get it working. The system also failed to find codecs for things such as mp3's. Why include tools that don't work, just put a note there for the user linking to a how to if your tools don't perform. I used Google search and came across several how to articles that describe how to add RPM Fusion repositories and install what you need for modern web functionality.
5. Updater still slow. Apt and Synaptic are still MUCH faster. I don't know if this is a repository issue or a software issue.
6. Add/Remove Software just needs work. It is not nearly as user friendly as Ubuntu's similar installer or even Synaptic. Don't get me wrong it works well enough but just trying to install OpenOffice was a chore because of the way they have the descriptions listed, I'm not really sure how it is supposed to be organised? For example Writer is listed below "Create WIKI articles..." as "Word Processor module for openoffice.org" both after all the language packs!
At this point I can not recommend Fedora 10 to anyone. Back to Linux Mint for me.
