thelinuxlink.net

Just in time for fc5 to be released, I've installed fc4 this weekend -- I need to get my RH chops up - they're lagging behind at this point, and I work in a redhat environment. I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. Of course, I needed to enable my favorite repos (dag, newrpms, freshrpms, kde-for-redhat) but once everything was up and running, the system is pretty slick. Fonts are very nice OOTB w/o any of the fooling around I need to do in arch or debian/(k)ubuntu, and flash actually stays in sync (something that really bugs the hell out of me on modt distros). It doesn't (so far) suffer from any of the strange bugs I've seen in kubuntu. I've also had more or less no crashing, which is nice. There's nothing more frustrating than having an app dissapear out from under you while you're in the middle of something. It feels pretty solid so far.

On the flip side, however, sound latency in the kernel is absolutely hideous. I had to turn off the sound server and route everything through "play" to get sounds and actions anywhere near in sync. Once I did that things were fine though. It sets up a lot of configs I don't really want done by default too - /etc/*cron* is full of jobs by default - while I can take care of this, it's not how I'd prefer things. Give me logrotate and leave everything else up to me IMO, but it's not really a problem. It suffers from the "everything *and* the kitchen sink" issue that kanotix does too - literally a hundred apps and mini-apps exist in my menus that I will simply *never* use. This is kind of a PITA, but not a showstopper. I can imagine most people don't want to spend an hour cleaning all that clutter up though. It also suffers from the monster dependency issues that I've come to know and loathe in most package managers - the list of deps for amarok was simply absurd. Also, surprisingly, I'm finding compiling apps to be somewhat of a pain in the ass. Many libraries are in slightly off-norm spots so my ./configure lines are half a page long sometimes. Checkinstall seems to be completely broken, too - segfaults everytime I run it. It also took the better part of the day to get configured, which isn't really a negative in my book, but its worth noting.

All that said, though, the positives outweigh the negatives. It's not going to be for people who like 20 second boots, or for people who like bsd-style anything - that's for sure. Will it be replacing arch on my workstation? No - but I might see how it behaves on my lappy.

I'd guess some of the problems you're having may come from using non-standard repositories. I don't use KDE of course, so that could be part of the problem, especially if you're getting things from non-Fedora repositories. I use strictly livna and Fedora Extras and I'm rock solid. I do use the nVidia graphics drivers, of course, but that's the only thing non-standard.

As far as having too much in your menus... you have the option of choosing what to install during the install process. I've got a server with FC4 on it that has about 400 megs of stuff installed total, and no X server at all. No kitchen sink. I usually do a default workstation install on my main system, and find it pretty trim compared to most distros.

At any rate, you've picked a good time to jump on the Fedora wagon. Things are really solid right now. It's not for everybody and far from perfect, but I like it.

I'll probably wait at least a few weeks after Core 5 comes out before I even think of upgrading. I watch the mailing list to see what problems other people are having then jump when things have cooled down. I usually run the test releases on a spare partition for a preview, but I'm just too busy right now.