7 ms·

Fedora 14 is out

59 points by skbohra123 16y ago

twymer 16y ago
I keep being tempted to move to something other than Ubuntu. Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" so I think I'm going to wind up installing this to see how it looks these days. Anyone use Fedora regularly?
- rwmj 16y ago
  Yup, I'm a developer. Red Hat (where I work) has a large team of people dedicated entirely to virtualization, so for that use, particularly higher-end server virt, it's getting very good.
  - danieldk 16y ago
    If you are Richard Jones, thank you for showing the world that functional programming can also be used for systems programming! :)
    - dman 16y ago
      Could you elaborate on this a bit - examples of functional languages in systems programming would be nice.
      - dman 16y ago
        On digging up a bit I found the following - [a] http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/ [b] http://www.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora http://www.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_a...
      - rwmj 16y ago
        It's not really systems programming, but we've done a lot of real world business programming in OCaml. Examples: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top/ http://libguestfs.org/ http://libguestfs.org/ has a lot of OCaml for internal stuff. The tools are written in Perl, but I wish they were written in OCaml :-) http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/guestfs-browser/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/guestfs-browser/ Another forthcoming tool which I can't mention yet. More projects here from the company I used to work for: http://merjis.com/developers http://merjis.com/developers
- TallGuyShort 16y ago
  I use Fedora's LXDE spin on my netbook, and the KDE spin on my workstation. Once I felt comfortable using Linux, I wasn't liking some of the directions Ubuntu was headed in (not that it's bad - it just wasn't targeted at someone like me), so I switched. Almost everything has always worked out-of-the-box for me, which has always been one of Ubuntu's strongest points. I used to do a lot of work with a custom kernel, and Fedora has some great tools for that kind of development. It's not as polished or user-friendly as Ubuntu, but if you like the Unix-ness of Ubuntu as opposed to the glitter, you'd probably feel more at home with Fedora, which is more traditional and generally has a more advanced community. edit: Plus, I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's products, so I like to be loyal :)
  - twymer 16y ago
    That's actually the big reason I was looking to change. I feel like every Ubuntu release is pulling more away from what I like to have.
    - bilban 16y ago
      What would you like to have?
      - TallGuyShort 16y ago
        Speaking for myself, this is why I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora. Let me clarify that I completely understand why most users would prefer's Ubuntu's approach, and I'm sure there are ways to make Ubuntu work this way, but basically I just feel more comfortable on Fedora for these reasons: - There's a huge amount of Ubuntu branding and renaming. I initially paid attention to this after the pretty silent updates that added "Ubuntu branding" to Firefox. I saw a lot of packages and applications that were renamed (or at least represented differently) to make them more generic. Personally, I would rather use the raw software and see the real names for the software packages. Fedora does this a bit too, but to a lesser extent. - The interface is very polished, but I like having a very raw, stripped-down interface. I generally work quickly, and I can't stand it when the OS can't keep up. I like KDE, and this can be a memory hog, but Ubuntu's additions are even worse, IMO. It was getting harder and harder with each version of Ubuntu to get the interface where I wanted, and now that they're branching away from standard GNOME, I only see this getting worse. - On that note, I was very unimpressed by Kubuntu, as it had obviously not received the same quality of attention as Ubuntu. As I prefer to use KDE and LXDE, I appreciate the very consistent quality between all the "spins" of Fedora. - SELinux and hard-drive encryption work out of the box. Again, I'm sure I could get this running just fine on Ubuntu, but it's so much easier with Fedora, so this contributed to me just feeling more at home. - The kernel had been modified a ton before it got shipped in a release. When I recompiled a kernel it wreaked havoc on some of the software that had previously relied on the added functionality. On Fedora I rebooted into a vanilla kernel and had no problems. I realize some of these are pretty abstract reasons, but these seem to be directions they're heading more and more, so as I said, I just feel more at home on Fedora, now that I'm comfortable using Linux.
- skbohra123 16y ago
  Yes, I do. And it's a prefect operating system for a developer. Latest versions are tested enough to be bug free, all developer tools are available in repository. Out of the box wifi, graphics card support. Works very well on my 2 year old Compaq AMD laptop so should work with almost everything out there. Community support is excellent. No mumbo jumbo fancy type stuffs as compared to other major main stream linux distro.
- vlisivka 16y ago
  Yep. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F TOTAL UNIQUE IPs: 25,719,833
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  I've been using Fedora since the early days, when it was still called Red Hat (Red Hat 6 was my first one) and it's a really great distro. Perhaps not as friendly as Ubuntu but maybe a bit more cutting edge. You will find that Fedora and Ubuntu are largely equal. However, coming from a .deb based distro you will probably find all the minor differences in RPM based distros really annoying; I feel the same frustration whenever I use Debian or Ubuntu.
- mziulu 16y ago
  My work pc is powered by Fedora (my boss is a huge fan). It is not what I would choose for my laptop/home desktop (I love to tinker and I find myself perfectly at home with Arch right now), but it's a pleasure to have this distro in a pc where you need the utmost stability and the distro choice must be as transparent as possible.
- demallien 16y ago
  Yup, I use it as my main development PC - I have a runtime for my project that runs on Fedora, but the main target is a Gentoo distribution. As others have noted, it's a bit more cutting edge than Ubuntu, which is fine, but some times cutting edges leaves you bleeding. I prefer to stay one step behind, ie now that Fedora 14 is out, it must be about time for me to move to Fedora 13 :) I find that the first 3 months or so of a distribution's life cycle tend to be a bit unstable, but you could probably safely upgrade after that time, no need to stay an entire cycle behind like I do, it's just that I tend to be rather cautious!
- olalonde 16y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are the pros/cons of moving from Ubuntu to Fedora? I'd like to try a new distribution as well.
  - mdaniel 16y ago
    I don't mean this sarcastically, but in the age of VirtualBox (which is not only a great product, but is also FOSS, so it appeals to a large market), why not just install F14 and give it a whirl? That way, you won't be dissuaded by someone else's opinion, and you won't have to explain your metrics to them. Having said that, I mostly agree with the other posters on this thread: Ubuntu is for your "I just want it to work" types, and Fedora is for sysadmin-hackery-types.
- aaronkaplan 16y ago
  Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" Wow, way back in 2007? Did you have to enter your programs on punch cards back then? :-) I use Fedora, and for the past few years it seems like every couple of months an update breaks something, like sound or wifi. Upgrades from one release to another are practically guaranteed to break something. So a while ago when I got a new laptop I installed ubuntu on it instead, hoping that things would be better. But after living with ubuntu for a while I didn't feel like it was any more stable, so I went back to Fedora just because that's what I know best. The vast majority of the bugs I run into are introduced upstream and both distros just pass them along for me to find. Apt is still faster than yum, and Ubuntu still seems to have somewhat more packages available than Fedora, but Fedora has closed the gap in both areas in recent years. All in all, I don't see a strong argument for either one over the other.
recampbell 16y ago
As per the announcement: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_announcement http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_announcement This is the first release to include official ec2 images. However, I'm having trouble finding them, anyone know the ami?
- rwmj 16y ago
  Justin tells me that AMIs are only currently available on US-East right now, but will be available for all EC2 users later today. Edit: When they are available, he'll post a message here: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2010-November/thread.html http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2010-November...
mseebach 16y ago
It's been a (long) while. Is yum still painfully slow?
- sigzero 16y ago
  I would say it has not been slow in the last few distros. I really like the delta downloads (it only downloads the changes and not full programs). It is generally a very nice distro to work with.
  - aaronkaplan 16y ago
    It seems to me that the delta thing has made updates slower, not faster. I have a reasonably fast network connection and a P4 CPU; maybe with a slow connection and a fast CPU the equation works out better with deltas. But I imagine the real advantage of using deltas is server-side, not client-side. Deltas or no deltas, apt feels significantly faster, but yum isn't slow enough to be a real problem for me.
    - nodata 16y ago
      Delta downloads are slower if you have lots of bandwidth or have a local rpm source (squid or a local mirror). You can easily disable deltas. Be careful: apt is deprecated. aptitude has been its replacement for a while now.
- mdda 16y ago
  yum got a lot faster a few Fedoras ago. Of course, if the speed of updating is so relevant, you should probably be using Fedora anyway, since it's rather bleeding edge.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    The speed of updating isn't all that relevant, the time from typing "{yum|apt-get} install foo" until I can start getting work done in foo, is.
- rwmj 16y ago
dman 16y ago
As a python developer one of the things I particularly like about Fedora is its inclusion of Python systemtap probes. This allows you to examine at a glance which python functions are taking most of the runtime. The fedora patches have been submitted for upstream inclusion at http://bugs.python.org/issue4111 http://bugs.python.org/issue4111 . More details about this feature can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemtapStaticProbes#Python http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemtapStaticProbes... . fwiw I am not affiliated with Redhat or any other OS vendor in any way.
dchest 16y ago
How do you get Ubuntu-like subpixel antialiasing in Fedora?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Legion 16y ago
  The lack of this is the primary reason I don't consider running Fedora over Ubuntu. Shallow, perhaps, but when you stare at a computer screen all day, good font rendering matters. There is a guy who maintains a set of Fedora packages with versions of Cairo and Xft with the relevant patches for that beautiful font rendering: http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5 http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5 I've always been reluctant to jump to Fedora and rely on this guy to keep up his work, though. EDIT: Looks like this guy already has these patched packages (and some Freetype tweaks too) ready for Fedora 14, see his most recent post. I still really wish this would get out of the "some dude has to patch it in" territory and just become the standard font rendering configuration for Linux distros besides Ubuntu.
  - dchest 16y ago
    Thanks! I actually tried installing these, but haven't noticed the warning that it shouldn't be configured via gnome-appearance-properties.
- aaronkaplan 16y ago
  I had never heard that there was a difference before reading your comment, so I did a web search for "ubuntu font rendering", and most of the results are something like "How to fix Ubuntu's terrible, ugly, blurry font rendering." It's interesting how much people's preferences vary on this subject. Is the patch that Legion refers to the same one that's in Ubuntu, or is that something else? In what applications do you see a difference? I've spent some time looking quite closely at Firefox's font rendering in Fedora vs. Ubuntu and didn't notice any differences.
runjake 16y ago
I just tried the default F14 desktop and the KDE spin (both on Live CDs) and I can't believe how depressing the desktop environments still are. The colors are depressing, there are little tiny buttons and icons everywhere, but no indication or popups as to what they do. The UI transitions are clunky (at least what I'm used to on Mac OS X and W7). Fonts are blocky. The KDE desktop looks kinda nice in screenshots, but once I started interacting with it, my positive impressions changed. I'm a guy who spends his time in Terminals, but like it or not, the GUI has become an effective management tool for all of this. Everything is virtually as I left it in 2001. This is depressing, because my plan was to eventually go back.
- old-gregg 16y ago
  Can't comment on KDE because I never liked them, but Ubuntu/Gnome has progressed quite nicely since 2005 (my first "Linux year"). In fact my opinion is 180 degree opposite of yours: 2 years ago I switched to OSX and couldn't tolerate how dumb and unusable the UI felt: I waited a year hoping to adjust but surrendered and went back to Gnome. I've given up on arguing about GUIs though: it all comes down to individual preferences, oftentimes in coffee shops and offices I look at people and notice how bizarre some of their UI habits are, and I'm sure others can say this about me. Here's my take on Gnove-vs-others, and a good counter argument made in the comments: http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-8.html http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-8.html
  - runjake 16y ago
    Great points. I think the thing that especially appeals to me about the OS X and W7 environments is that they're not an eye sore (warm colors & effects, not kludgy looking), and they have quick access to system-wide search that works (Spotlight and Windows Search, respectively). These are my rather minimalist needs. I have a hard time coming up with an analogy, but when I open windows on one of the live CDs, I feel like there's a gnome (no pun intended) in the background grabbing and stapling up shoddy UI mockups on the inside of my LCD. It all comes down to tastes, as you say, though. I used to be a MOTIF and IceWM guy, so mine have definitely changed. I can't imagine "most people" would like the state of the Linux UI, though. Having used KDE (since it was an ugly Windows 95 clone, anyone remember those initial efforts?) and GNOME from their births, not much has really seemed to change. Meanwhile, the UI paradigms have shifted significantly, in the rest of the computing world.
Matthew_S 16y ago
I'm relatively new to the linux world. I started using Ubuntu about 3 years ago. I moved to Fedora just to experiment, and it was one of the best choices I made. They do well to encourage their community to contribute, and they make it so easy to do. It got me involved from the start, and had me starting to dabble in python and learn how to make desktop widgets. Also, having all the dev tools needed available in meta-packages is a huge plus. As well as starting me on the path of coding and learning how to contribute to a project, Fedora may very well be the reason I am back in school for CSIS. That's something other OS's may have never offered me. I have a lot to thank these guys for, hopefully one day I'll be able to. I'd say it's totally worth trying out. There's a lot of young and innovative minds out there that are googling "how to be a hacker" as I write this, and I hope that they come across the Fedora project while searching.
kev009 16y ago
Python 2.7 and D support. Nice!
sagarun 16y ago
Fedora/yum has a kick ass killer feature, which is called "presto - The delta RPM" . I live in a developing country where the internet/bandwidth is costly. Presto saves my bandwidth and money. When i last updated my F13 Presto reduced the update size by 83% (from 194 M to 33 M). For this i will stay with Fedora for ever.

59 points by skbohra123 16y ago

I keep being tempted to move to something other than Ubuntu. Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" so I think I'm going to wind up installing this to see how it looks these days. Anyone use Fedora regularly?

rwmj 16y ago
Yup, I'm a developer. Red Hat (where I work) has a large team of people dedicated entirely to virtualization, so for that use, particularly higher-end server virt, it's getting very good.
- danieldk 16y ago
  If you are Richard Jones, thank you for showing the world that functional programming can also be used for systems programming! :)
  - dman 16y ago
    Could you elaborate on this a bit - examples of functional languages in systems programming would be nice.
    - dman 16y ago
      On digging up a bit I found the following - [a] http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/ [b] http://www.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora http://www.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_a...
    - rwmj 16y ago
      It's not really systems programming, but we've done a lot of real world business programming in OCaml. Examples: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top/ http://libguestfs.org/ http://libguestfs.org/ has a lot of OCaml for internal stuff. The tools are written in Perl, but I wish they were written in OCaml :-) http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/guestfs-browser/ http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/guestfs-browser/ Another forthcoming tool which I can't mention yet. More projects here from the company I used to work for: http://merjis.com/developers http://merjis.com/developers
TallGuyShort 16y ago
I use Fedora's LXDE spin on my netbook, and the KDE spin on my workstation. Once I felt comfortable using Linux, I wasn't liking some of the directions Ubuntu was headed in (not that it's bad - it just wasn't targeted at someone like me), so I switched. Almost everything has always worked out-of-the-box for me, which has always been one of Ubuntu's strongest points. I used to do a lot of work with a custom kernel, and Fedora has some great tools for that kind of development. It's not as polished or user-friendly as Ubuntu, but if you like the Unix-ness of Ubuntu as opposed to the glitter, you'd probably feel more at home with Fedora, which is more traditional and generally has a more advanced community. edit: Plus, I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's products, so I like to be loyal :)
- twymer 16y ago
  That's actually the big reason I was looking to change. I feel like every Ubuntu release is pulling more away from what I like to have.
  - bilban 16y ago
    What would you like to have?
    - TallGuyShort 16y ago
      Speaking for myself, this is why I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora. Let me clarify that I completely understand why most users would prefer's Ubuntu's approach, and I'm sure there are ways to make Ubuntu work this way, but basically I just feel more comfortable on Fedora for these reasons: - There's a huge amount of Ubuntu branding and renaming. I initially paid attention to this after the pretty silent updates that added "Ubuntu branding" to Firefox. I saw a lot of packages and applications that were renamed (or at least represented differently) to make them more generic. Personally, I would rather use the raw software and see the real names for the software packages. Fedora does this a bit too, but to a lesser extent. - The interface is very polished, but I like having a very raw, stripped-down interface. I generally work quickly, and I can't stand it when the OS can't keep up. I like KDE, and this can be a memory hog, but Ubuntu's additions are even worse, IMO. It was getting harder and harder with each version of Ubuntu to get the interface where I wanted, and now that they're branching away from standard GNOME, I only see this getting worse. - On that note, I was very unimpressed by Kubuntu, as it had obviously not received the same quality of attention as Ubuntu. As I prefer to use KDE and LXDE, I appreciate the very consistent quality between all the "spins" of Fedora. - SELinux and hard-drive encryption work out of the box. Again, I'm sure I could get this running just fine on Ubuntu, but it's so much easier with Fedora, so this contributed to me just feeling more at home. - The kernel had been modified a ton before it got shipped in a release. When I recompiled a kernel it wreaked havoc on some of the software that had previously relied on the added functionality. On Fedora I rebooted into a vanilla kernel and had no problems. I realize some of these are pretty abstract reasons, but these seem to be directions they're heading more and more, so as I said, I just feel more at home on Fedora, now that I'm comfortable using Linux.
skbohra123 16y ago
Yes, I do. And it's a prefect operating system for a developer. Latest versions are tested enough to be bug free, all developer tools are available in repository. Out of the box wifi, graphics card support. Works very well on my 2 year old Compaq AMD laptop so should work with almost everything out there. Community support is excellent. No mumbo jumbo fancy type stuffs as compared to other major main stream linux distro.
vlisivka 16y ago
Yep. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F TOTAL UNIQUE IPs: 25,719,833
DrJokepu 16y ago
I've been using Fedora since the early days, when it was still called Red Hat (Red Hat 6 was my first one) and it's a really great distro. Perhaps not as friendly as Ubuntu but maybe a bit more cutting edge. You will find that Fedora and Ubuntu are largely equal. However, coming from a .deb based distro you will probably find all the minor differences in RPM based distros really annoying; I feel the same frustration whenever I use Debian or Ubuntu.
mziulu 16y ago
My work pc is powered by Fedora (my boss is a huge fan). It is not what I would choose for my laptop/home desktop (I love to tinker and I find myself perfectly at home with Arch right now), but it's a pleasure to have this distro in a pc where you need the utmost stability and the distro choice must be as transparent as possible.
demallien 16y ago
Yup, I use it as my main development PC - I have a runtime for my project that runs on Fedora, but the main target is a Gentoo distribution. As others have noted, it's a bit more cutting edge than Ubuntu, which is fine, but some times cutting edges leaves you bleeding. I prefer to stay one step behind, ie now that Fedora 14 is out, it must be about time for me to move to Fedora 13 :) I find that the first 3 months or so of a distribution's life cycle tend to be a bit unstable, but you could probably safely upgrade after that time, no need to stay an entire cycle behind like I do, it's just that I tend to be rather cautious!
olalonde 16y ago
Out of curiosity, what are the pros/cons of moving from Ubuntu to Fedora? I'd like to try a new distribution as well.
- mdaniel 16y ago
  I don't mean this sarcastically, but in the age of VirtualBox (which is not only a great product, but is also FOSS, so it appeals to a large market), why not just install F14 and give it a whirl? That way, you won't be dissuaded by someone else's opinion, and you won't have to explain your metrics to them. Having said that, I mostly agree with the other posters on this thread: Ubuntu is for your "I just want it to work" types, and Fedora is for sysadmin-hackery-types.
aaronkaplan 16y ago
Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" Wow, way back in 2007? Did you have to enter your programs on punch cards back then? :-) I use Fedora, and for the past few years it seems like every couple of months an update breaks something, like sound or wifi. Upgrades from one release to another are practically guaranteed to break something. So a while ago when I got a new laptop I installed ubuntu on it instead, hoping that things would be better. But after living with ubuntu for a while I didn't feel like it was any more stable, so I went back to Fedora just because that's what I know best. The vast majority of the bugs I run into are introduced upstream and both distros just pass them along for me to find. Apt is still faster than yum, and Ubuntu still seems to have somewhat more packages available than Fedora, but Fedora has closed the gap in both areas in recent years. All in all, I don't see a strong argument for either one over the other.

recampbell 16y ago

As per the announcement: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_announcement http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_announcement This is the first release to include official ec2 images. However, I'm having trouble finding them, anyone know the ami?

rwmj 16y ago
Justin tells me that AMIs are only currently available on US-East right now, but will be available for all EC2 users later today. Edit: When they are available, he'll post a message here: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2010-November/thread.html http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2010-November...

mseebach 16y ago

It's been a (long) while. Is yum still painfully slow?

sigzero 16y ago
I would say it has not been slow in the last few distros. I really like the delta downloads (it only downloads the changes and not full programs). It is generally a very nice distro to work with.
- aaronkaplan 16y ago
  It seems to me that the delta thing has made updates slower, not faster. I have a reasonably fast network connection and a P4 CPU; maybe with a slow connection and a fast CPU the equation works out better with deltas. But I imagine the real advantage of using deltas is server-side, not client-side. Deltas or no deltas, apt feels significantly faster, but yum isn't slow enough to be a real problem for me.
  - nodata 16y ago
    Delta downloads are slower if you have lots of bandwidth or have a local rpm source (squid or a local mirror). You can easily disable deltas. Be careful: apt is deprecated. aptitude has been its replacement for a while now.
mdda 16y ago
yum got a lot faster a few Fedoras ago. Of course, if the speed of updating is so relevant, you should probably be using Fedora anyway, since it's rather bleeding edge.
- mseebach 16y ago
  The speed of updating isn't all that relevant, the time from typing "{yum|apt-get} install foo" until I can start getting work done in foo, is.
rwmj 16y ago

dman 16y ago

As a python developer one of the things I particularly like about Fedora is its inclusion of Python systemtap probes. This allows you to examine at a glance which python functions are taking most of the runtime. The fedora patches have been submitted for upstream inclusion at http://bugs.python.org/issue4111 http://bugs.python.org/issue4111 . More details about this feature can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemtapStaticProbes#Python http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemtapStaticProbes... . fwiw I am not affiliated with Redhat or any other OS vendor in any way.

dchest 16y ago

How do you get Ubuntu-like subpixel antialiasing in Fedora?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Legion 16y ago
The lack of this is the primary reason I don't consider running Fedora over Ubuntu. Shallow, perhaps, but when you stare at a computer screen all day, good font rendering matters. There is a guy who maintains a set of Fedora packages with versions of Cairo and Xft with the relevant patches for that beautiful font rendering: http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5 http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5 I've always been reluctant to jump to Fedora and rely on this guy to keep up his work, though. EDIT: Looks like this guy already has these patched packages (and some Freetype tweaks too) ready for Fedora 14, see his most recent post. I still really wish this would get out of the "some dude has to patch it in" territory and just become the standard font rendering configuration for Linux distros besides Ubuntu.
- dchest 16y ago
  Thanks! I actually tried installing these, but haven't noticed the warning that it shouldn't be configured via gnome-appearance-properties.
aaronkaplan 16y ago
I had never heard that there was a difference before reading your comment, so I did a web search for "ubuntu font rendering", and most of the results are something like "How to fix Ubuntu's terrible, ugly, blurry font rendering." It's interesting how much people's preferences vary on this subject. Is the patch that Legion refers to the same one that's in Ubuntu, or is that something else? In what applications do you see a difference? I've spent some time looking quite closely at Firefox's font rendering in Fedora vs. Ubuntu and didn't notice any differences.

runjake 16y ago

I just tried the default F14 desktop and the KDE spin (both on Live CDs) and I can't believe how depressing the desktop environments still are. The colors are depressing, there are little tiny buttons and icons everywhere, but no indication or popups as to what they do. The UI transitions are clunky (at least what I'm used to on Mac OS X and W7). Fonts are blocky. The KDE desktop looks kinda nice in screenshots, but once I started interacting with it, my positive impressions changed. I'm a guy who spends his time in Terminals, but like it or not, the GUI has become an effective management tool for all of this. Everything is virtually as I left it in 2001. This is depressing, because my plan was to eventually go back.

old-gregg 16y ago
Can't comment on KDE because I never liked them, but Ubuntu/Gnome has progressed quite nicely since 2005 (my first "Linux year"). In fact my opinion is 180 degree opposite of yours: 2 years ago I switched to OSX and couldn't tolerate how dumb and unusable the UI felt: I waited a year hoping to adjust but surrendered and went back to Gnome. I've given up on arguing about GUIs though: it all comes down to individual preferences, oftentimes in coffee shops and offices I look at people and notice how bizarre some of their UI habits are, and I'm sure others can say this about me. Here's my take on Gnove-vs-others, and a good counter argument made in the comments: http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-8.html http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-8.html
- runjake 16y ago
  Great points. I think the thing that especially appeals to me about the OS X and W7 environments is that they're not an eye sore (warm colors & effects, not kludgy looking), and they have quick access to system-wide search that works (Spotlight and Windows Search, respectively). These are my rather minimalist needs. I have a hard time coming up with an analogy, but when I open windows on one of the live CDs, I feel like there's a gnome (no pun intended) in the background grabbing and stapling up shoddy UI mockups on the inside of my LCD. It all comes down to tastes, as you say, though. I used to be a MOTIF and IceWM guy, so mine have definitely changed. I can't imagine "most people" would like the state of the Linux UI, though. Having used KDE (since it was an ugly Windows 95 clone, anyone remember those initial efforts?) and GNOME from their births, not much has really seemed to change. Meanwhile, the UI paradigms have shifted significantly, in the rest of the computing world.

Matthew_S 16y ago

I'm relatively new to the linux world. I started using Ubuntu about 3 years ago. I moved to Fedora just to experiment, and it was one of the best choices I made. They do well to encourage their community to contribute, and they make it so easy to do. It got me involved from the start, and had me starting to dabble in python and learn how to make desktop widgets. Also, having all the dev tools needed available in meta-packages is a huge plus. As well as starting me on the path of coding and learning how to contribute to a project, Fedora may very well be the reason I am back in school for CSIS. That's something other OS's may have never offered me. I have a lot to thank these guys for, hopefully one day I'll be able to. I'd say it's totally worth trying out. There's a lot of young and innovative minds out there that are googling "how to be a hacker" as I write this, and I hope that they come across the Fedora project while searching.

kev009 16y ago

Python 2.7 and D support. Nice!

sagarun 16y ago

Fedora/yum has a kick ass killer feature, which is called "presto - The delta RPM" . I live in a developing country where the internet/bandwidth is costly. Presto saves my bandwidth and money. When i last updated my F13 Presto reduced the update size by 83% (from 194 M to 33 M). For this i will stay with Fedora for ever.