JN4OldSchool
05-16-2008, 07:39 AM
First of all, I am obviously biased towards Fedora being a long term Fedora user. So what I am about to say should carry some weight.
I am very disappointed but it is not so much with the distro as the developers.
The Good:
Fedora 9 seems to be a tight release according to the forum traffic. Not too many "bugs" going on, everything works as advertised (see the bad for the exception here). It has many new features designed to bring Fedora more into the mainstream. There is now an easy way to put the ISO on a USB key, a new package manager designed to simplify things in this area, Gnome 2.2 is solid and beautiful, ext4 is included but is still in development, Firefox 3 seems to work well for most (see quote below), and way too many other features to list. Fedora 9 is being touted as the most noob friendly Fedora release yet (in all honesty, shouldnt the latest release of ANY distro be the most noob friendly yet? Duh!) At any rate, the development team is well aware of the guinea pig reputation Fedora has and they are trying to change that. It seems the direction of Fedora is changing and while they still want to be portrayed as cutting edge they also want to be seen as a separate entity apart from RHEL and they want to lose the geeky guru syndrome of only catering to experienced Linux users. They want to attract the masses. I strongly disagree with this approach, I liked Fedora for what it was, a friendly, helpful, yet elite group of openminded users on the cutting edge ironing out the bugs for the mainstream distros. That all said, the ironic part is how Fedora 9 actually turned out.
The Bad:
If you are an nVida user you cannot have 3D graphics! Yep, you read right! At least not for a while. Well, you can have 3D graphics, I do, but you better be prepared to jump through hoops. The problem is the xorg server. They are giving it a huge facelift, which is awesome. The project kind of got bogged down, as most open source projects tend to do, and the final release got slipped. That is cool, it happens. So now the Fedora developers are scrambling, what to do? Unfortunately, instead of just downgrading to the old xorg server for the release, then updating when things are ready, they decided they wanted to stay on the cutting edge. So no nVidia support, at least not at this point. The nVidia guys actually released a beta driver that works. But the best way for fedora is to use the Livna driver which is a re-worked nVidia driver. I wont get into the details, but this is the best way. The Livna driver is weeks out at best. The other alternative is for the users to downgrade the xorg server themselves. This is what I did, it is not too bad for a competent Linux user, but more than a noob should have to face. I am sorry, a final release distro in this day and age without 3D capability is a joke! A very bad joke. Then we have the GDM thing. GDM is what controls the login screen. It is also in beta and has problems. The least of which is at this point in time it has no capability to change the greeter screen! You are stuck with the Fedora default for now. OK, to be fair, you can compile the beta GUI GDM editor from Gnome, but come on guys...KDE 4 is an abomination at this point, but again, Fedora just has to be first, ya know? At least it is easy to slip back to KDE 3.* (whatever it is). Oh, the list goes on and on. For a supposed "noob friendly" release, this version, at this point, needs a Linux expert to install and run. I feel like I am still using the Rawhide (development) version. Again, the distro itself is almost bug free, the problem is in all the beta apps it is running. This is a quote from a thread dealing with problems with Firefox 3:
Yeah FF3 is a beta in a (supposed) stable distro release. From what I heard ( a rumor?), the FF developers consider 3.05b to be production quailty.
I note a good number of things in F9 that are "incomplete" and in the works. As far as I am personally concerned F9 is actually just a beta for F10. We'll be keeping F8 on all our boxes here except for a couple of F9 test boxes. There's nothing in F9 that personally benefits us changing to it. I do find a good number of benefits in not changing though.
That sums up the whole experience. All the Fedora gurus are getting defensive on the forum, blaming nVidia for the problem. I'm sorry guys, it wasnt nVidia that released a development xorg server that didnt have support yet. Yeah, I love fedora 9, I am having a ball with it. It works great for me. But was it a mistake to release it in this condition? Oh yeah! Every release people complain it was released too early, that is just the nature of the beast. But since FC4, when I started, this is the first time that it is true. They should have slipped the release 2-3 months early on, or they should have downgraded many of these components until they were ready for prime time. My advice to anyone wanting to "try" F9? Stay away for now. Give it a month or two for this stuff to stabilize. Then it is going to be a prime, A number 1 distro.
I am very disappointed but it is not so much with the distro as the developers.
The Good:
Fedora 9 seems to be a tight release according to the forum traffic. Not too many "bugs" going on, everything works as advertised (see the bad for the exception here). It has many new features designed to bring Fedora more into the mainstream. There is now an easy way to put the ISO on a USB key, a new package manager designed to simplify things in this area, Gnome 2.2 is solid and beautiful, ext4 is included but is still in development, Firefox 3 seems to work well for most (see quote below), and way too many other features to list. Fedora 9 is being touted as the most noob friendly Fedora release yet (in all honesty, shouldnt the latest release of ANY distro be the most noob friendly yet? Duh!) At any rate, the development team is well aware of the guinea pig reputation Fedora has and they are trying to change that. It seems the direction of Fedora is changing and while they still want to be portrayed as cutting edge they also want to be seen as a separate entity apart from RHEL and they want to lose the geeky guru syndrome of only catering to experienced Linux users. They want to attract the masses. I strongly disagree with this approach, I liked Fedora for what it was, a friendly, helpful, yet elite group of openminded users on the cutting edge ironing out the bugs for the mainstream distros. That all said, the ironic part is how Fedora 9 actually turned out.
The Bad:
If you are an nVida user you cannot have 3D graphics! Yep, you read right! At least not for a while. Well, you can have 3D graphics, I do, but you better be prepared to jump through hoops. The problem is the xorg server. They are giving it a huge facelift, which is awesome. The project kind of got bogged down, as most open source projects tend to do, and the final release got slipped. That is cool, it happens. So now the Fedora developers are scrambling, what to do? Unfortunately, instead of just downgrading to the old xorg server for the release, then updating when things are ready, they decided they wanted to stay on the cutting edge. So no nVidia support, at least not at this point. The nVidia guys actually released a beta driver that works. But the best way for fedora is to use the Livna driver which is a re-worked nVidia driver. I wont get into the details, but this is the best way. The Livna driver is weeks out at best. The other alternative is for the users to downgrade the xorg server themselves. This is what I did, it is not too bad for a competent Linux user, but more than a noob should have to face. I am sorry, a final release distro in this day and age without 3D capability is a joke! A very bad joke. Then we have the GDM thing. GDM is what controls the login screen. It is also in beta and has problems. The least of which is at this point in time it has no capability to change the greeter screen! You are stuck with the Fedora default for now. OK, to be fair, you can compile the beta GUI GDM editor from Gnome, but come on guys...KDE 4 is an abomination at this point, but again, Fedora just has to be first, ya know? At least it is easy to slip back to KDE 3.* (whatever it is). Oh, the list goes on and on. For a supposed "noob friendly" release, this version, at this point, needs a Linux expert to install and run. I feel like I am still using the Rawhide (development) version. Again, the distro itself is almost bug free, the problem is in all the beta apps it is running. This is a quote from a thread dealing with problems with Firefox 3:
Yeah FF3 is a beta in a (supposed) stable distro release. From what I heard ( a rumor?), the FF developers consider 3.05b to be production quailty.
I note a good number of things in F9 that are "incomplete" and in the works. As far as I am personally concerned F9 is actually just a beta for F10. We'll be keeping F8 on all our boxes here except for a couple of F9 test boxes. There's nothing in F9 that personally benefits us changing to it. I do find a good number of benefits in not changing though.
That sums up the whole experience. All the Fedora gurus are getting defensive on the forum, blaming nVidia for the problem. I'm sorry guys, it wasnt nVidia that released a development xorg server that didnt have support yet. Yeah, I love fedora 9, I am having a ball with it. It works great for me. But was it a mistake to release it in this condition? Oh yeah! Every release people complain it was released too early, that is just the nature of the beast. But since FC4, when I started, this is the first time that it is true. They should have slipped the release 2-3 months early on, or they should have downgraded many of these components until they were ready for prime time. My advice to anyone wanting to "try" F9? Stay away for now. Give it a month or two for this stuff to stabilize. Then it is going to be a prime, A number 1 distro.