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Fedora 11 came out a few days ago (two weeks late, but who’s counting) so I went ahead and grabbed a copy and installed it. I figured I’d weigh in with my initial impressions since this is a pretty significant release. A few caveats to keep in mind for this.
- I’m going to talk really about the desktop experience here. I’ve not put it on a server and really beaten it up.
- I’ve installed it onto VirtualBox on my MacBook pro. Meaning, I have NOT installed it directly onto real hardware anywhere.
- As a consequence, I really haven’t bothered to even attempt testing out the Compiz stuff. Which is a shame becuase I love it.
The install was predictably painless. I intentionally clicked as few things as possible during the process and installed from the LiveCD, which is how I expect most people will be doing it. I think the only extra I may have done was to use NTP for getting the time. This is somewhat relevant because it means I got their default package selection for a desktop, as opposed to picking out all the things I know I’ll want at install time. Everything “just worked” the way it has with Fedora for a long time now, though I did feel like the process was a little faster than it had been on previous releases. This was surprising and pretty cool considering it was going onto VirtualBox and I didn’t give it a crazy amount of RAM or anything (768M). For the record, I’m running Leopard 10.5.7 on my MacBook and have the newest version of VirtualBox installed, which is 2.2.4 at the time of this writing.
I’ll start with the things I wasn’t that impressed with to get them out of the way.
For starters, I’m not a big fan of the default Fedora theme that was installed. I felt like the Fedora team was really going somewhere with Clearlooks back when it was first released, but since then, each “refinement” just feels a little more blue, and a little more cartoon-ish. It’s like they haven’t quite caught up with the reality that modern themes are moving towards more subtle gradients and bevels, with Apple’s design department as usual leading the charge. It’s not that this theme is bad, it just didn’t hold any “wow” factor for me. Furthermore, the installed additional options for themes, backgrounds, and so on was somewhat anaemic. Doing a yum search for more themes and installing the obvious choices didn’t really help. I’m still using the default Fedora theme because, although I don’t love it, it’s still my favourite choice.
The next nit-pick I have relates to Gnome-Do. Do is a truly awesome little piece of software that is similar to Quicksilver on OS X, but on steroids. I use it all the time, and I’m constantly trying to figure out new ways to get it to do cool things for me. It wasn’t installed by default, which I take no issue with as it’s a fairly new player on the Gnome desktop. The problem is that when I installed it, none of the plugins came with the installation. Nor was there a separate package for the plugins. This sucks, since the bulk of the cool stuff that you can do with Do is via plugins. A little searching indicated that the problem was, quite simply, nobody had bothered to package them for this release. Hopefully somebody will soon and they’ll get in there, but it’s a very sub-par experience using it compared to my Ubuntu desktop where all the usual plugins are easy to get and install via apt-get.
Finally, and this one I really do think is bad, none of the Openoffice software was installed by default. I have no idea if this was an oversight or, more likely, a decision, but I consider it pretty egregious in either case. Openoffice is certainly the de-facto office suite for the Gnome environment at this point, and not including it in the standard desktop install is a mistake. Users want it to be there. Abiword was there, which I personally use more than the OO word processor, but I’m and edge case and I know it. That should have been there.
That said, there’s a lot that I think they got right with this release. The update to the newest version of Gnome is an incremental one. Not much has changed, but it’s a bit smoother and faster. Users of previous releases will feel right at home, and I really don’t feel much of a shift doing normal things compared to my Ubuntu desktop. I consider that to be a very good thing.
True to Fedora form, the software that you can get is very much on the cutting edge. GCC is the brand spanking new 4.4 release, the python they ship is the 2.6 release designed to help people transition from the current 2.x series to the upcoming 3.x. Monodevelop (which I care about quite a bit personally) is the full fledged newest 2.0 release. I’m sure there’s going to be some issues because things are so new, but Fedora has always had the mindset of shipping the very newest versions of things it can get away with, and it’s continuing to do so here.
I have a few favourites in the newness category. The first is MySQL, which installs at version 5.1.32. Yes, I’m aware of all the hoopla surrounding the 5.1 release not being ready, but like it or not, it’s out there. I’m glad the Fedora crew shipped it, because even if there are bad bugs, the best way to get them fixed quickly is to get people using the software. The next one I love is Firefox, which installs at version 3.5 beta 4 It’s great. No problems thus far, and I get to play with the newest and shiniest toys.
Okay, so I just realized I lied. I have one more nitpick, which is that none of the beagle packages were installed by default. This one, I suppose, isn’t that big a deal, but I just installed it for the desktop, Evolution, Firefox, and Epiphany and the download was less than five megs. Search is getting more and more important, and users are really coming to expect it. I can’t see much argument for not including it by default, especially considering how nicely it works.
Everybody is expecting Fedora 11 to be the foundation for RHEL 6, whenever it comes out, and I think that this is a solid release for that purpose. There’s lots of updated software, but really it’s mostly an incremental release from Fedora 10 (yes, I know about ext4, no I don’t think it’s that drastic) and that means that the Red Hat crew is already dealing with a fairly mature and stable starting point. The amount of software available in the repositories is just staggering at this point, and things that don’t get into RHEL 6 will almost certainly be easily available from EPEL. In terms of ease of use, eye candy, and polish, I still have to give the nod to Ubuntu’s last release for desktop use. But Fedora has done a very good job I think of getting this amount of bleeding edge technology in front of people in a very attractive and usable way.
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
Well, OpenOffice is simply too large for the LiveCD.
@Mark I know OpenOffice is pretty big, but if I’m not mistaken, they got it onto the Ubuntu LiveCD. I’d have to do a clean Ubuntu install to be 100% sure, but I really think it was there by default. I know it’s a yum install away in Fedora, but in terms of appealing to the masses, having a usable office suite there from minute one seems like a good idea IMHO.
I preupgraded from fc10 to fc11 on three machines. The two that had nvidia cards had the most problems. One had a problem with the default pulse audio erroneously set for the onboard SBLive card in addition to the video problem as well as ntp daemon being a regressive version in FC11. Much of this was resolved by uninstalling fc10 drivers that preupgrade had not switched over to the fc11 versions and then installing the latter. I would have thought that these problems would have been resolved before the final release. Once working – fc11 rocks! However, the default background Leonidas theme just makes me cringe. Really tacky – and looks worse with the kde login screen which was very cool in fc10. Looks like a bad faux finish job from the early 80s! And what the heck is that ghostly cartoon character in the background? What were they thinking?