A Look Through Fedora 16 Alpha

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Look Through Fedora 16 Alpha

Fedora 16 Alpha was released earlier this week while the final release is not due until early November. If you have not yet tried out this latest Fedora development release, in this Phoronix article is a brief look through the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16340

[d2kx]

Over the last years I have been running Debian, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Fedora, openSUSE, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, ... all had advantages and disadvantages and I could never decide what to stay with.

I am glad these "fights" are over for me as Ubuntu (with Unity) nowadays is far ahead of its competition and this advance gets stronger with every new release. If you just compare Ubuntu 11.04 with a daily build (Beta 1 coming out next week) of Ubuntu 11.10 and see all those drastic improvements that are now happening every six months...

[leif81]

The alpha has barely anything new in terms of gnome 3.2 stuff yet. Just wait, it should be in by F16 beta.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome3.2

BTW the screenshots are quite blurry. Must be an image compression thing.

[frantaylor]

If you try running Fedora >= 15 in vmware, it's decidedly a "second class citizen" experience without gnome-shell

I understand the support difficulties, but I have a hard time getting anything done in Fedora nowadays. There are too many obscure settings, hidden away inside programs that are not installed by default. I've spent quite a while poking and prodding at my Fedora installations to get them to the point where I can do rudimentary things like:

- turn off the screen blanking
- get left-click to work
- turn on focus-follows-mouse
- remove launchers from the task bar

In older fedoras, I could do all of these things in a few seconds, without installing any extra programs or googling around. Now every install is a new adventure as I discover more and more functionality has been shuffled off into some obscure checkbox on a program that I have to install first.

I really do wish that they had kept gnome-2 around as either a parallel install or an alternative install. I love the new kernels in fedora, but I resent being treated as a beta tester. I do think that gnome-3 is a step in the right direction, but it's clearly not done yet. I just want a stable desktop so I can do my work without aggravation. I've started using gentoo because I can use a new kernel and keep gnome-2. I've also tried both Centos 6 and SL 6 with a custom-compiled new kernel RPM, but many of the packages are too old for my requirements.

[Nevertime]

I like the wallpaper

[Yfrwlf]

Unlike Ubuntu, not much is going on within Fedora's package manager. The outdated version of the Phoronix Test Suite also appears to have been removed. If some packager is interested in updating the phoronix-test-suite Fedora package, that would be most appreciated. It would allow for easier benchmarking under Fedora and similar operating systems.

How about package phoronix-test-suite with a cross-distro standard like Zero Install so you won't have to ever worry about that?

[Michael]

How about package phoronix-test-suite with a cross-distro standard like Zero Install so you won't have to ever worry about that?

Well technically the Phoronix Test Suite doesn't need any of that... Just install PHP and you're fine with the tarball and don't need to worry about any phoronix-test-suite installation (it will run fine locally out of the box), administrator rights (aside from package installation it handles automatically), or anything else. But there is a good number of users that prefer going to their distribution's repository to fetch the package by habit.

[devius]

Looks good. Love the wallpaper.
Just two things I don't like about Gnome3:
- Huge title bar on every window
- 90% wasted space on the top panel; all that horizontal space to accommodate a digital clock? WTF?
Either than that I have no problems adapting to it or any other desktop environment for that matter, although I do prefer Unity. That package manager is beginning to look outdated.

[drag]

The big title bar is irritating. You can make it a bit smaller by changing the font size.

[Yfrwlf]

Well technically the Phoronix Test Suite doesn't need any of that... Just install PHP and you're fine with the tarball and don't need to worry about any phoronix-test-suite installation (it will run fine locally out of the box), administrator rights (aside from package installation it handles automatically), or anything else. But there is a good number of users that prefer going to their distribution's repository to fetch the package by habit.

Yes, yes you can do all that, but ZI is easier. Just ask yourself "Can Joe Sixpack easily install and run this?". Shouldn't users have the freedom to install software and versions of software that aren't in their repositories? How many Phoronix readers, for example, would love to try out all the new releases of PTS you mention but are put off by all the manual difficulties: installing all dependencies either through their repo or in some other way, create menu entries, manually download and unpack new versions when a new release comes out. Compared to ZI: automatic updates, automatic menu icon creation, automatic dependency handling, and more.

Compare that with other benchmarking software like 3DMark. Windows users have it easy.

Believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons why users stick to Windows over Linux, and it's not just a lack of games. Windows users enjoy a vast software landscape not just because of the monopoly of Microsoft, but because of extremely long-lasting functional software installation packages. They can easily share software with other users because everyone is on the same page. Getting Linux users on the same page would be extremely advantageous. Not to mention, with ZI, you have Windows, Linux, and Mac users all able to be on the same page should there be binaries for those platforms.