Fedora 13 Review!I’ve been using Fedora 13 for a few weeks now, so it’s time to relay my thoughts on the new release.
I’ve never had a good experience upgrading a Linux operating system to the new version, and usually elect to just do a fresh install but I was assured that the “preupgrade” application would meet my needs. It was a simple application but carried the unfortunate downside of not working. At the time of Fedora 13’s release it appeared that on a lot of systems including both my desktop and my laptop the application incorrectly reported insufficient space on the /boot partition of the drive and thus refused to upgrade the system. Further annoying is the fact that this bug was reported and fixed before the final Fedora 13 release, and yet appeared not to have been rolled out into the Fedora 12 repositories in time.
I assume that the issue has been fixed, since I have seen reports of many smooth upgrades on the Identiverse since; however this was a fairly major issue which could have been handled better. So in the end I resolved to do a fresh install, which went without a hitch. I was amazed at how fast the installation went and I was up and running straight off, and in this new version the first time configuration displayed properly with two screens (which were detected and configured automatically) which was one of the only problems I had with Fedora 12.
In terms of new features there is certainly no shortage. Many distributions seem to treat upgrading to a new version of software as a new feature (And there is plenty of that: KDE 4.4, Netbeans 6.8 for example) when not much innovation has gone on since the last release but Fedora certainly seems to have made an effort to introduce truly new features as well as actually improving how the Fedora software compilation works together; improvements to Pulseaudio integration, improved GNOME colour management as well as automatic print driver installation which fall together to make the Fedora desktop an increasingly complete desktop. Another notable improvement is that one can now install Python 3 in parallel with Python 2, which is a big help for developers.
My personal favourite newcomer is the advent of compositing for the open source ATI drivers (as well as the NVIDIA one as far as I’m aware), which means that Fedora is no longer limited or made inferior by being a Free desktop solution. This is what we’re after, in the end the free software movement can only succeed when we have brilliant developers creating software that is equal to or better than the proprietary equivalents.
Unfortunately there are still a few items within Fedora which really need to be adressed and I think that the main one of these is the PackageKit GUI. While it is simple and you can install software through it, it’s also lacking features and is a definite weak point in the desktop experience. There is one particularly annoying bug which has come to my attention which is that if you are upgrading software which requires a system restart then a notification will pop up asking you to restart both before and after the actual update is performed, which could cause problems to those not watching carefully.
Overall, the system is still nice and stable and the software works. The new features have really come together well for a smoother desktop experience though I think it may be easy to miss quite a few of the more subtle but essential improvements to the system as a whole.
I’ve never had a good experience upgrading a Linux operating system to the new version, and usually elect to just do a fresh install but I was assured that the “preupgrade” application would meet my needs. It was a simple application but carried the unfortunate downside of not working. At the time of Fedora 13’s release it appeared that on a lot of systems including both my desktop and my laptop the application incorrectly reported insufficient space on the /boot partition of the drive and thus refused to upgrade the system. Further annoying is the fact that this bug was reported and fixed before the final Fedora 13 release, and yet appeared not to have been rolled out into the Fedora 12 repositories in time.
I assume that the issue has been fixed, since I have seen reports of many smooth upgrades on the Identiverse since; however this was a fairly major issue which could have been handled better. So in the end I resolved to do a fresh install, which went without a hitch. I was amazed at how fast the installation went and I was up and running straight off, and in this new version the first time configuration displayed properly with two screens (which were detected and configured automatically) which was one of the only problems I had with Fedora 12.
In terms of new features there is certainly no shortage. Many distributions seem to treat upgrading to a new version of software as a new feature (And there is plenty of that: KDE 4.4, Netbeans 6.8 for example) when not much innovation has gone on since the last release but Fedora certainly seems to have made an effort to introduce truly new features as well as actually improving how the Fedora software compilation works together; improvements to Pulseaudio integration, improved GNOME colour management as well as automatic print driver installation which fall together to make the Fedora desktop an increasingly complete desktop. Another notable improvement is that one can now install Python 3 in parallel with Python 2, which is a big help for developers.
My personal favourite newcomer is the advent of compositing for the open source ATI drivers (as well as the NVIDIA one as far as I’m aware), which means that Fedora is no longer limited or made inferior by being a Free desktop solution. This is what we’re after, in the end the free software movement can only succeed when we have brilliant developers creating software that is equal to or better than the proprietary equivalents.
Unfortunately there are still a few items within Fedora which really need to be adressed and I think that the main one of these is the PackageKit GUI. While it is simple and you can install software through it, it’s also lacking features and is a definite weak point in the desktop experience. There is one particularly annoying bug which has come to my attention which is that if you are upgrading software which requires a system restart then a notification will pop up asking you to restart both before and after the actual update is performed, which could cause problems to those not watching carefully.
Overall, the system is still nice and stable and the software works. The new features have really come together well for a smoother desktop experience though I think it may be easy to miss quite a few of the more subtle but essential improvements to the system as a whole.
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