ten buck fedora 2778

If I were to list only the bugs that I found myself, would amount to open a Bugzilla right here. It's by far the buggiest distribution I've seen, and I've seen since RH5.0 every day.

Suffices to say, a few lines into the installation the kernel panics (on Intel boards 865 and higher). The fix? Type garbage at the boot prompt. I mean, come on... How could this bug have not been noticed by the developers prior to the release? And what kind of fix is that? Also if you boot in level 3, when you exit the X server, you never get the console back. The fix? Overwrite libvgahw.a with the one from FC3. The gui configuration tools (network, firewall, possibly others), don't write out the files properly, keep the old configuration. Etc. etc. Also, there's bloat. Gratuitous, unnecessary dependencies to packages that could conceivably be separated. For instance tetex brings with it 40M of japanese fonts.

Some things that I did like. Yum is faster. Mplayer and transcode are a breeze to install from livna, if you add livna.repo to the yum repositories. I also liked a lot the automounter, which comes configured (auto.net) to mount whatever nfs exports it finds, onnet. That's very convenient for backups, if you have 2 machines. No longer need gtkam to talk to the usb digital camera. When you connect the camera to the usb port, a window pops up automatically (gthumb --import-photos) and talks to the camera. Pretty cool. Gnome seems faster too, if only the config tools worked properly.

So I think a lot of effort went into automatizing things, but now there's all these bugs that need to be fixed. If they freeze the development and just work on the bugs, FC5 would be a very very good distribution. But I doubt they will. Some bugs in FC4 date back to FC2 and possibly earlier.

As it stands, FC4 must be the most on the edge distribution out there right now.