I just installed the new Fedora15 (desktop, not RedHat) release, which comes with Gnome Shell, by default.
I've personally been a fan of Red Hat/Fedora for a long time, went through a Mandrake/Mandriva phase, and came back. I have found the hardware coverage on Fedora to be pretty extensive (even F9 automagically handled everything on my old Satellite Pro better than XP did). I'm running F15 on a Qosmio, now, and haven't touched the power settings (might be able to tweak them, but I find the defaults to be sane). I sort of like KDE, and ran it for a couple of versions with Mandrake/ Mandriva, but I think Gnome is a bit more solid in some areas. Although, I wish Dolphin and a couple of other tools were replicated in Gnome. Fedora will do either/both from the Anaconda install. Anaconda is a pleasure to work with, and includes the 'unattended' capability of saving the configuration, and using it to automate other installs. Some of my preferences to Fedora stem from it largely replacing Mandrake's original release: given that it was *largely* a Fedora+KDE spin (IIRC). Fedora tends to have a mature user base; the forums are (IMHO) more informative and less hystrionic, for example, than some of the flashier distros. It takes a bit longer for software to dribble into the repos (Firefox 4 only hit the official repos a week ago, released with F15) because Redhat does a fair bit of retesting and modification before anything is considered stable for the non-testing repos. The stability of about everything is correspondingly good. There are a couple of things (Eclipse) that I prefer the manufacturer's release of, but I like the stuff I don't have a direct interest in to just work. The liveCD for Fedora has worked well in my experience, and I think is worth a gander at. Coincidentally, a friend of mine went through a similar exercise, recently. Moved from Ubuntu by co-installing 4 different distros on a machine, and competing them on everything he does (media-streaming, Android development, etc). He chose Fedora after a shorter testing round than he expected, and has been very happy with it. Gnome Shell: My jury is still out on this one. I expect it's like moving to a Dvorack keyboard (or the new swype) in that it's really slowing me down, but it *feels* like it's faster... But I felt the same way about GUIs when they first came out, and I can now wheel around almost as fast as in a console. Faster, depending on the system. It feels like there is more of a benefit awaiting out past the learning curve. Change is a pre-req of progress. It should be a good choice for a laptop running on batteries--I believe (without subjective testing) there is a lot less power consumption going on, and the desktop has somewhat more real estate-- and is designed with portable devices in mind. It's a bit beta-y at the moment (changing the pediatrician's-wallpaper logon background takes some hacking, or file-replacement, for example) but they're still working on it all, and leaving skinning/themeing stuff for later (and once the js/css guys start running it, themes should come fast and thick). I find a lot of stuff missing from the GUI, where I go to look for it (Network manager doesn't seem to have a way to just disconnect/reconnect a connection, except to hit another one, or turn the wifi off & on) and a good knowledge of command-line options goes a long way, here. Plus, the whole GUI is essentially a js/ css front-end, so if something is missing, it can be changed as a js extension. XP: I also run Windows extensively, but I have found I prefer to run it in a VM (VirtualBox being my favorite, but looking at KVM more and more). I find XP in a VM to be more performant than on the actual hardware, a lot of the time (eg, subjectively it seems to boot faster). In my case, though, if I'm testing dev code, I might have two or three XP VMs running fullscreen on different desktops, and just switch between them and Linux. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup Please remember to abide by our list rules (http://tinyurl.com/LUG-Rules or http://cdn.fsdev.net/List-Rules.pdf)
