Fedora's recipe for success must include Cinnamon

[Fedawkins]

I'm pleased to say that F16 is back on the table as a usable option for me. After first trying 16 out, I found gnome 3 clunky and more than a little annoying regarding things like missing minimize buttons requiring user tweaking to be usable.
One big issue that Fedora seems behind on is fonts. I tried messing around with mscore font installation and whatnot, but in the end fonts still had a very rough, amateur look to them. In firefox in particular, it hurt to read more than a few lines (and I tried all the various font options).

Tried KDE - too much eye-candy and gizmos.
Tried LXDE - used this for about a month, was generally happy with it aside from font display but found pcmanfm to be very unstable, constantly causing system crashes.
XFCE - didn't offer anything more than LXDE

So about a month ago I installed Mint 12, and loved it. Everything worked out the box, I didn't have to go messing about with cryptic settings to get everything looking normal, and most importantly the fonts look as good, if not better, than a Windows system. and then I put Cinnamon on it, because gnome 3 was still clunky and slow.

I only saw last week that Cinnamon was available for F16, and tried it out right away - WOW, what an improvement!
Nevermind that the fonts look about 100x better (though not quite as smooth as Mint), users are not required to get under the hood to make something like a shutdown option appear on the main menu.

At this point F16 is my preferred o/s simply because Mint has proved itself somewhat less stable overall - my work requirements necessitate having a web browser, skype, calc and writer documents, and Gimp open - and I like having music going, so Audacious is usually open alongside these other apps. However Mint becomes very flaky with this many apps running, mp3 play gets interrupted, moving between apps becomes jerky and crash-prone, and from time to time the entire system bombs.
F16 on the other hand, with the same apps open, is like a rock.

I would urge Fedora developers to take some time to think about the gaps Cinnamon is filling, in particular the fonts issue - they may seem like airy trivial issues but they matter to the end-user. Sad to say, were it not for Cinnamon I would have left F16 firmly behind.

[leigh123linux]

Hopefully cinnamon will be approved soon.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=773470

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252

[RupertPupkin]

I wouldn't say that Fedora's recipe for success must include Cinnamon; Fedora is by far the most widely-used distro, so it's been pretty successful even before Cinnamon. In fact many users have moved to Fedora precisely because of GNOME 3, more than offsetting the number of people who've left because of it. But I do think that leigh's packages for Cinnamon have been important in getting those people who were upset with GNOME 3 to stick with Fedora, and even winning over new users to Fedora. I think everyone here - whether they use Cinnamon or not - should give a big thanks to leigh for all his hard work in providing those packages. He's doing Fedora a great service.

[sanhozay]

Originally Posted by Fedawkins

So about a month ago I installed Mint 12, and loved it. Everything worked out the box, I didn't have to go messing about with cryptic settings to get everything looking normal, and most importantly the fonts look as good, if not better, than a Windows system.

You can achieve the same font settings on Fedora as Ubuntu/Mint using:

http://blog.andreas-haerter.com/2011...ke-sharp-fonts

Do they use the Ubuntu font on Mint? It looks like it from screenshots. You can install the Ubuntu font using another set of instructions from the same blog:

http://blog.andreas-haerter.com/2011...onts-fedora.sh

Just need an Ambiance theme and you are good to go!

[deanej]

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

In fact many users have moved to Fedora precisely because of GNOME 3, more than offsetting the number of people who've left because of it.

Are you sure they moved because they liked Gnome 3 and not because Unity is horrible?

[sanhozay]

Ubuntu has Gnome Shell as an option in 11.10 so that wouldn't be a compelling reason to switch any more. When Unity came out in 11.04, there were a handful of people who said they were moving to Fedora for Gnome Shell but most defection amongst those set against Unity seemed to be to Mint, Kubuntu (KDE) and Xubuntu (XFCE). The sticking point for many is the panels/menus.

[skypeace]

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

I wouldn't say that Fedora's recipe for success must include Cinnamon; Fedora is by far the most widely-used distro, so it's been pretty successful even before Cinnamon. In fact many users have moved to Fedora precisely because of GNOME 3, more than offsetting the number of people who've left because of it. But I do think that leigh's packages for Cinnamon have been important in getting those people who were upset with GNOME 3 to stick with Fedora, and even winning over new users to Fedora. I think everyone here - whether they use Cinnamon or not - should give a big thanks to leigh for all his hard work in providing those packages. He's doing Fedora a great service.

Had been a Mint user for at least the past three years, at least since Gloria Mint 7 and with Gnome 3 and Mint 12 I was not impressed and began looking for an alternative. Remembering my first Linux was Red Hat back in the mid ninties and so gave Fedora a spin, was intrigued immediately and have just plain fell in love. Funny because the branching off of Fedora in the past was my reason for leaving Red Hat and moving to Mandrake at that time.

Fedora is now my Linux of choice, thanks to the devs for a wonderful distro.

[Piscium]

Originally Posted by Fedawkins

One big issue that Fedora seems behind on is fonts. I tried messing around with mscore font installation and whatnot, but in the end fonts still had a very rough, amateur look to them. In firefox in particular, it hurt to read more than a few lines (and I tried all the various font options).

When I started using Linux, about 2.5 years ago, one of the first things I noticed was how ugly were the fonts on FF. The way I solved that was by copying all the Windows fonts in my PC from c:\windows\fonts to ~/.fonts, and then changing the FF fonts settings.

Another thing you could try is in your preferences dialogue box, look for Appearance or something to that effect, and then look at your settings for fonts rendering. There probably will be several, for example, monochrome, best shapes, best contrast and subpixel smoothing. You could try them all and see which one you like best.

[ericthered]

I've been using Cinnamon on Fedora 16 for a while now and I'm quite happy with it. Definitely a big improvement over G3. But, I would like to see a focus on improving all spins-- KDE, LXDE, and XFCE, maybe an openbox spin as well.