One thing that fedora really has over ubuntu, by leaps and bounds, is artwork. Each release has a contest and all the entries are great. The artwork is awesome. I use fedora backgrounds in ubuntu because it is so much better.
So that makes me wonder, is that because ubuntu doesn’t have a contest or because fedora folks are just better at art?
So, I ran into an interesting issue two days ago, and it makes me wonder if the ubuntu installer is in fact broken.
Many of you know that a moved back to ubuntu after a two month stint with fedora. I kept my same home folder to keep preferences and such. So, I was a little surprised when I went to go and change some user preferences with the gui tool and my user wasn’t there, didn’t exist. What happened? Well it seems that as the ubuntu installer made my user it didn’t change permissions on my home folder to my new user of will with a uid of 1000, but kept my old user of will with a uid of 500. This caused some kind of hang up and the only thing that I could think to do was to backup and reinstall.
So, what I would expect is what both fedora and Opensuse do. They ask you, “hey, there is already a home folder by that name, should we change the permissions so it is yours?”
I may have to high of standards. But really, I don’t think that is to bad of a thing. I have found to many limitations with fedora to have it on my laptop. I run a webserver for a webdevelopment testing on the website. So, I have everything running on fedora and low and behold, the webserver won’t follow symlinks. It wouldn’t follow them no matter what I tried. Not, acceptable. Fedora -1
Banshee suddenly refused to play anything. The cure? Reinstall banshee and all GStreamer codecs. Fedora -1
So, I will try OpenSUSE on the laptop and see what I think. Wish me luck.
So, I have had my first big frustration with Fedora on my laptop. When I am at work I hook up a second monitor and have a huge desktop. I like having the real estate, it is just nice. So, with ubuntu it was easy. I would use the nvidia-settings tool and after a couple clicks I would log out and in and voila! I have my desktop. Everything worked fine, when the second monitor wasn’t connected it would start right up.
Not so with fedora! Using the same nvidia driver and the nvidia-settings tool in fedora the thing just borks. If I can get both screens up then the next restart the window manager won’t come back up. So, X screen is there, but when I start a window, there is no window bar at the top so that I can close, move or resize the window. So, how did I fix this? Well, after dealing with it for an hour or so, I reinstall the nVidia driver to fix it. Argh, it worked fine in ubuntu.
Fedora -1
I got tired of ubuntu. Now, this may not surprise some, but for me, this really is pretty big. I am tired of some of the fight I have had to have a working system. So, the other day after my wife complained again about update issues, I installed Fedora 9 on the home machine. And it really isn’t that bad. It is easier to get MP3 support and DVD playback than ubuntu. Although some things are harder. Syncing my palm for instance. I had to hunt down the two packages that I needed in order to sync my calendar w/ evolution. A little frustrating. And after one of the updates it rewrote my xorg.conf without a mouse. Took me a while to figure out that one. But, in general, it really does feel solid. I like sudo, so I will have to enable that. And Clint still needs to package the latest gnome-do for me because I like DO.
So for now, ubuntu goodbye. I will try out intrepid when it is released.
So I have been trying Fedora Seven for about two months now. And I must say that it is easily my second favorite distribution out there. For starters it has a liveCD. Being still relatively new to Linux I was very surprised to find that comparatively few distro’s have liveCD’s. So I like that. You can also get iso’s that don’t have the liveCD feature but . . . why? So I pop in the CD and everything loads up well. After a few clicks and answering a couple of questions I watched the installer take off. Everything goes really quite smoothly, and with little other adieu we are up and running.
First impression: this looks slick. It is the gnome desktop but it has a smooth feel to it, a sort of softness that is rather inviting. I realize that this may sound odd, but by way of comparison to my favorite distro (ubuntu) it doesn’t look like a bunch of dirt. I like the clouds and hot-air balloons.
Now, coming from a Debian based distro, going to an RPM based distro has some real . . . shall we say challenges. I am very used, and comfortable with the aptitude/apt-get system. It is easy to add repos too, to search for packages, the commands are rather straight forward. I find my yum and RPM experience quite different. Adding a repo was simple, but not the same as I am used to and so it took me 30 minutes to add one. Also, with no bash completion finding the exact package name was kind of hard. Updating seems to take forever, after it tells you what you have to upgrade/install it then has to resolve the dependencies, a task that takes way to long for what it is doing it seems. Aptitude tells you what it needs in about 3 seconds, and then you merrily go on your way. The “Add Remove Software” option in the “Applications” menu seems very disjointed, and once you get away from the grouped view and just search for what you want life gets much easier.
On curve that I didn’t quite understand at first was that you are not in the sudoers list by defualt. Every root change that you want to do must be preceded with ‘su‘. ubuntu is very different in this regard. You don’t even set up a root password in ubuntu, and you can’t su until you change it. I thought at first that this was a Fedora flaw, and then I see that most systems have it that way. My friend Clint explained that while using su you can track changes that you have made better. You can also have better security. So I have learned to live with that and have tried to use su on ubuntu more often.
One huge plus to Fedora for me was the easy configuration of screen size and resolution. It is slick and easy for even the most basic user. A real selling point for me, a basic user.
In short, I like Fedora a lot. I am still more comfortable in ubuntu, but what a great thing going on for Fedora! I realize that I am making this review 4 days before the Fedora 8 “Werewolf” release. I plan on updating to that and seeing what it is like.