Fedora 16 Features With Desktop, Virtualization, Etc

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 16 Features With Desktop, Virtualization, Etc

Fedora 16 (codenamed Verne) is set to be released at the end of October while the software string freeze and alpha change deadline just passed this week, with the only alpha release being scheduled to take place in mid-August. Fedora 16 is set to continue in Red Hat's tradition of contributing real innovations to the Linux stack, with some of the new Verne features being talked about in this posting...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTc0Nw

[droidhacker]

Well, although I respect RH for pushing the boundaries with Fedora, I really hope that they put some more work into having a usable DE. Gnome3, in its F15 state was (is) totally unusable for power users (I can see how it may be sufficient for casual users), and required some hacking to get gnome-panel-3 into a state sufficiently close to what it was in gnome-2. Gnome-shell was a lost cause.

[RahulSundaram]

Well, although I respect RH for pushing the boundaries with Fedora, I really hope that they put some more work into having a usable DE. Gnome3, in its F15 state was (is) totally unusable for power users (I can see how it may be sufficient for casual users), and required some hacking to get gnome-panel-3 into a state sufficiently close to what it was in gnome-2. Gnome-shell was a lost cause.

I don't know how anybody can declare this. I would say I am a power user since I have been using free and open source software and Linux for over 10 years now and after installing a few extensions, I am quite satisfied with the UI and I haven't hacked anything to look close to GNOME 2.x. However if someone does like the GNOME 2.x UI, flippery extension or even Xfce is a option. Hardly possible to complain about the lack of choices in desktop environments and window managers in Linux :-)

[spykes]

I don't know how anybody can declare this. I would say I am a power user since I have been using free and open source software and Linux for over 10 years now and after installing a few extensions, I am quite satisfied with the UI and I haven't hacked anything to look close to GNOME 2.x.

There are serious lacks in the Gnome-shell packed with F15. The most annoying things to me are :
- The impossibility to create custom launchers from the UI (yet it's a basic thing IMO).
- The impossibility to set the font rendering from the UI, as it was possible in Gnome 2.x (actual font rendering is horrible on my display).
- No option to tell Mutter to redirect fullscreen windows which is causing performance regressions in all my 3D apps.
- And several other small things...

All this makes the Gnome-shell experience very frustrating to me. Even the half-backed "fall-back mode" has less feature than the previous Gnome 2.x shell.

Doing less is the quickest/easiest way to simplify the UI, but it's not the best. I hope Gnome developers are aware of that, and that it's just a matter of time before we get all the features back.

[RahulSundaram]

There are serious lacks in the Gnome-shell packed with F15. The most annoying things to me are :
- The impossibility to create custom launchers from the UI (yet it's a basic thing IMO).
- The impossibility to set the font rendering from the UI, as it was possible in Gnome 2.x (actual font rendering is horrible on my display).
- No option to tell Mutter to redirect fullscreen windows which is causing performance regressions in all my 3D apps.
- And several other small things...

All this makes the Gnome-shell experience very frustrating to me. Even the half-backed "fall-back mode" has less feature than the previous Gnome 2.x shell.

Doing less is the quickest/easiest way to simplify the UI, but it's not the best. I hope Gnome developers are aware of that, and that it's just a matter of time before we get all the features back.

Nothing specific to do with Fedora packaging. GNOME Shell in Fedora is unmodified from upstream. However 2) is possible via GNOME Tweak Tool which is in the Fedora repository and for 3) work is being done upstream. 1) is possible to change via extension and flippery is one such extension. I understand that some users do not like the UI experience and my comment was not about that but about declaring it unusable for power users when this is merely a matter of opinion

[liam]

Well, although I respect RH for pushing the boundaries with Fedora, I really hope that they put some more work into having a usable DE. Gnome3, in its F15 state was (is) totally unusable for power users (I can see how it may be sufficient for casual users), and required some hacking to get gnome-panel-3 into a state sufficiently close to what it was in gnome-2. Gnome-shell was a lost cause.

I guess I'm not a "power user". I just use my computer for work.

[drag]

There are serious lacks in the Gnome-shell packed with F15. The most annoying things to me are :
- The impossibility to create custom launchers from the UI (yet it's a basic thing IMO).

This is possible.

- The impossibility to set the font rendering from the UI, as it was possible in Gnome 2.x (actual font rendering is horrible on my display).

So.. you are really saying that installing Gnome-Tweak-Tool is a barrier to power users?

I think you are being overly critical. Especially of a X.0 release. This is a damn sight more useful then Gnome 2.0 release was. Blows the KDE 4.0 release out of the water.

It also features a fully scriptable (and extensible) desktop environment with a legitimate (widely known) full-turing language, a integrated debugging tool for extensions, as well as a vastly superior theme-ing engine to Gnome 2.x.

It seems to me that people like to confuse "Have a huge Window with multiple tables 4000 sliders and buttons for every option under the sun" with something that is "Power user" friendly.


Personally I think they did a fantastic job and I am looking forward to other improvements they are going to introduce in newer versions.

[liam]

This is possible.




So.. you are really saying that installing Gnome-Tweak-Tool is a barrier to power users?

I think you are being overly critical. Especially of a X.0 release. This is a damn sight more useful then Gnome 2.0 release was. Blows the KDE 4.0 release out of the water.

It also features a fully scriptable (and extensible) desktop environment with a legitimate (widely known) full-turing language, a integrated debugging tool for extensions, as well as a vastly superior theme-ing engine to Gnome 2.x.

It seems to me that people like to confuse "Have a huge Window with multiple tables 4000 sliders and buttons for every option under the sun" with something that is "Power user" friendly.


Personally I think they did a fantastic job and I am looking forward to other improvements they are going to introduce in newer versions.

Although I like that they are using "CSS" to style things, I'm not sure it is better, let alone vastly better.
However, when they more fully support CSS3 that will help a lot (very annoying that you can't use an svg for tiling), but I think this is mostly libcroco's fault.

[kraftman]

I think you are being overly critical. Especially of a X.0 release. This is a damn sight more useful then Gnome 2.0 release was. Blows the KDE 4.0 release out of the water.

I remember when people were screaming how KDE 4.0 (so not the final version) is broken etc. I didn't like Gnome 2, but it was far more usable than Gnome 3 is. KDE 4.0 was a major overhaul made by using completely new toolkit, unlike gtk3 which is nothing special compared to its previous version. KDE 4 brought many new concepts while Gnome 3 brought only Shell which is a big step backward in terms of usability in my opinion. I'm not amazed Rahul found Shell to meet his needs while he works for Red Hat which contributed a lot to Shell. As for Fedora it's my primary distribution, because KDE spin works very good on my box and what's more important - Fedora has excellent systemd and delta rpms which is something great. I hope btrfs will be default in F16 and there will be an easy way to make a system snapshots. As far I found one downside. There's harder to install codecs than in Ubuntu.

[kraftman]

It seems to me that people like to confuse "Have a huge Window with multiple tables 4000 sliders and buttons for every option under the sun" with something that is "Power user" friendly.

Power user, as the name suggests should be able to do 'power things' with his DE. I think some people confuse power users with the noob users, but I wouldn't recommend shell to noobs.