Fedora 11, I hardly knew ye
- Posted by: JP Smith | July 17, 2009
- Filed Under: Open Source
Generally, I find it hard to complain about something that is free. And, honestly, I am going to try to avoid that here but, after about a week, I had to remove Fedora 11 from my computer. For those not familiar with Fedora, it is RedHat's community Linux distribution. Typically, it's know for having some cutting edge features, highly configurable security options and a great polished look.
So, with all these things going for it, why didn't I stick with it?
Well, let me first give you a little history about me. I have been using Linux 10+ years. In that time, I have seen Linux/FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) come a long way. I am quick to defend and slow to criticize because so often, Linux projects revolve around developers who give their time and efforts to make their distributions available to the world for no money at all.
Also, understand something, I am speaking only on my personal experience with this distribution. There are countless others for whom this works perfectly. However, I felt the need to share my experience in hopes that Linux devs understand what some of us see that causes us to look for other Linux offerings when we hit a wall with our current Linux distribution.
Install:
What can I say...it went perfectly. For me, Fedora has one of the best installers in terms of consistency and reliablity. I was able to set up my users, partition my disks and install the operating system without a hiccup. After about 30-40 minute, I was logging in and ready to do updates and install new software.
Software Updates/Installs:
Again, this was not a problem. In fact, I was specifially happy to see the introduction of the Presto plugin. Presto allows a user to only update software the part that changed, versus downloading the entire new package. Fedora says that this can reduce the download size of a particular software package by 60-80%. This is a real time-saver. In general, I have very little trouble doing updates in Fedora and Fedora 11 is no exception. In no time, I had downloaded my software and felt like I had a good working system.
Then, it happened:
Actually, it kind of began before my updates. You see, apparently there was a conscious decision by the Fedora maintainers to disable starting the network at boot. So, I had to go to the NetworkManager applet to start my network. I later went into the configuration to have the network connection start at boot. But, really, if I were concerned about my computer being connected to a network at boot, couldn't I just unplug my ethernet cable from the network card? But, hey, that's minor and easily rectified so, I moved on.
The next day, I tried to burn data to a DVD. When I put in the blank DVD, nothing happened. By that, I mean Fedora didn't even recognize that there was a DVD in the drive. I rebooted and voilá, I coud see the blank DVD. I researched this on-line. One post I read said I needed to install autofs (a filesystem mounter). The other said I needed to change my authorizations so, just in case, I went into the authorization manager an granted myself what I believed I needed to mount removable media. However, with other distros I have tried recently (Ubuntu, Sabayon, Mandriva, OpenSuse, etc) this was not an issue. But, okay, I did what I needed to do and moved on.
Now, here's where I started getting bugged. On occassion, the screen saver would seem to kick in when I was surfing. I could see if I just sat there reading for 20 minutes but, I had been moving the mouse and clicking. Therefore, it should have seen me as active.
Oh, but back to the DVD burning. So, the DVD is recognized and I go to burn about 1.4 gigs to it. I have two burners on this machine, one burns DVDs at 16x, the other claims to work up to 20x. I have disks that allow me to write up to 16x. So, why did the Brasero disk burning utility only allow me to burn between 2-3x? From what I read, I am far from the only person dealing with this bug. There are programs available that work better but, this is the program Fedora chose to integrate with their file manager, which makes it the one most available for users. Needless to say, this had me concerned as it took much longer to burn this amount of data than it has in other distros.
But, the thing that made me throw in the towel was the strange bug that would cause everything except my mouse pointer to become virtually unresponsive. I could move the cursor as fast as I wanted but, I couldn't close windows or logout. In the end, I had to hit the reset button on my computer get out of there.
When I logged back in, I tried burning about 700 megs of data to a CD. It was an Ubuntu .iso image. It took too long to burn but, I knew that this was likely the last time for me with Fedoral 11. When the disk finished writing, I rebooted with that same disk and installed Ubuntu.
I can't say for sure what's changed but, it feels like Fedora is a little too cutting edge to be useful for me. I hold out hope for 12 but, for now, I am going to have to pass on this release.
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