Impressions of F15 so far

[smr54]

As Dan's thread at http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=259442 is, in theory, about Gnome 3, thought I'd start this one for folks to give their general impressions.

My own;
Still very buggy. Unfortunately, the majority of bugs will be one timers. (I've done several installs on VirtualBox, and a couple on unimportant laptops.)

I tried the default installation. Gnome 3 wouldn't work on Vbox (expected) nor on a laptop with an integrated Intel card. It used the Gnome fallback. Things I noticed.
The printing config tool wouldn't let me add a network printer.

On one install, it wouldn't let me log in, just kept repeating the Gnome dialog--glad this only happened on one install, I'm not even sure how to describe it, let alone file a bug--when I went to a console, I saw that I had about 30 gdms.

On one LXDE live, put on a USB, it wouldn't get past log in on an NVidia. (Not unexpected, that was just a test to see if Noveau worked with that particular card.)

My usual method is to do a minimal installation, then add X and fluxbox. This went more smoothly--the netiso doesn't require me to put in a URL---I don't remember if that's a new improvement or if I haven't used the netinstall iso for awhile, as opposed to boot.iso.

The first TC used the new ethernet labling of pci#2 or something similar. My thought was that using # in a device name might cause problems down the road, but the RCs seem to have stopped that.

One install, on console, would echo the password--that is, I would get the log in prompt, log in, then get the password prompt. The password would show up in clear text, and the keyboard seemed a bit odd--that is, ctl+L wouldn't clear the screen, tab completion didn't work. However, using ctl+alt+F2 to get to a new terminal, all worked as it should.

On another couple of tests, in fluxbox, the keyboard was a bit odd--I would be typing something in X term and it would suddenly seem to stop accepting input.

So, lots of little odd bugs, to be expected in an alpha.

One thing that they may not consider a bug is that networking seems to be expecting NetworkManager to be installed. If one looks in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, NM_CONTROLLED=yes was consistent across all tests. As I don't use it, I changed this to no, ran chkconfig network on and all was fine.

On the positive side, I see that /etc/inittab, though no longer used, has very clear instructions on how to set the run level--this makes sense to me, putting these instructions in the spot where the people who change their runlevel would look.

Printing was easily configured with cups and hplip. My only problem is that if one uses a minimal installation, to have scanning work on HP all in ones, one has to install libsane-hpaio (thanks to marriedto51 for that tip), but that's a known issue and I believe the developer is getting it fixed. (It is fixed if one uses system-config-printer, but I think that was upstream.) Japanese input works with either anthy or the newer mozc.

All in all, I think once the bugs get ironed out, there won't be any bad surprises.

[Dan]

The recycling logins are nothing new. <....>

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1425860

[smr54]

Ah I should have mentioned, as one of the bugs, sudo isn't working. (I've only done it by group, rather than user, but a user of the wheel group is unable to use sudo.)

recycling logins--thanks for putting a name to it for me. Your pragmatic solution made me chuckle.

[bob]

As mentioned in the other thread, my hardware (ASUS K8V-MX mobo, AMD Sempron 2600; 2 gig Ram, Nvidia GeForce 6200 , twin 80 gig HD's) apparently doesn't come up to F15's demands and I'm now booting to nothing but the wallpaper and a stall at "starting Display Manager". Might give it another try when we get closer to Final, but I'm seriously thinking of KDE (shudder) or a lighter DM.

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by bob

As mentioned in the other thread, my hardware (ASUS K8V-MX mobo, AMD Sempron 2600; 2 gig Ram, Nvidia GeForce 6200 , twin 80 gig HD's) apparently doesn't come up to F15's demands and I'm now booting to nothing but the wallpaper and a stall at "starting Display Manager". Might give it another try when we get closer to Final, but I'm seriously thinking of KDE (shudder) or a lighter DM.

I am going to move to Scientific Linux release 6.0 as there isn't a suitable replacement for Gnome in Fedora (LXDE doesn't run stable here and XFCE sucks).
Gnome3 is just a plaything IMO and isn't up to the needs of a production system (I used Fedora since FC5 for production without any issues till now).
I think F15 here will be limited to a minimal VM install just to test the packages that I maintain (this is less because I dumped AWN as it mainly a gnome based system IMO)

[bob]

Leigh, sorry to say but you've got a good idea there. I doubt that there will be any last-minute decision to halt the juggernaut of Gnome3, any more than the Art department had on the default wallpaper. There are times when I wonder if the devs are really were interested in how the users feel.

[Dan]

Uhm ... in a word? No. It sure doesn't look like it. Downloading Scientific now.

[smr54]

Ok folks, who ever thought I'd be the one defending some Fedora changes.

If you folks look at the testing list, you'll see Adam, as usual, busily working on behalf of the users, dealing with some of the broken stuff being released. The Gnome desktop that you folks like will still be available as far as I can tell. At present, as some of us have noted, Gnome 3 won't even run on our hardware.

Fedora and Ubuntu (and Mint, I reckon) seem to be the main desktop oriented distributions, at least in the US. Keep in mind that SL is going to be, in a year or two, more like using CentOS now.

(Not sure what Mint is going to do-- especially if the Gnome folks themselves wind up more or less abandoning the current Gnome for Gnome 3.)

BTW, anyone see Gnomeo and Juliet? Kind of cute, but the Japanese that was in it had such a strong English accent that neither my wife nor CentOS' toracat, both native speakers, could figure out what was being said without repeated listenings.

[bob]

Thanks to AdamW for all he does on our behalf and to you too for that tidbit about Ye Olde Legacy Gnome still being an option. I'd have liked to play with Gnome3 but my hardware won't allow it and I'm not about to plunk down $500 for the pleasure.

In the meantime, I'll play with Scientific to see if it's a real option.

[smr54]

Note that I'm not 100 percent positive about Gnome legacy, but I know they definitely have the fallback. (Actually ,that wasn't the specific thing, as far as I know, that Adam is working for on our behalf, it had to do with something else that got pushed out that shouldn't have.)

[LightDot]

I don't mind testing Gnome Shell, but I don't want to use for my everyday work just yet. If Fedora 15 provides a fully fledged Gnome Panel, as it is now in Gnome 2.32, than ok...

If Gnome Panel isn't there, I'll stick with Fedora 14 for a while longer and than switch to either CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6. If later Fedoras, such as 16 or 17, prove to be on the right track again, I might switch back. Gnome 3 should be a bit more mature by then.

Just as a side note, I've been lurking on the CentOS devel list for some time now and things there seem a little bit odd to me. I mean, community wise - or lack of a such thing. That's what makes me consider Scientific Linux more and more... As far as I can see, they have made SL 6 much closer to stock RHEL 6, when compared to the previous version. That was my main reason for choosing CentOS over SL.

(edit: typos)

[smr54]

Ok, the whole CentOS thing is, as you say a bit odd, but there's long history of it being odd. Despite that, it keeps getting out the door eventually. There is hope that it will open a bit after this batch of releases (6.0, 5.6, and 4.9).

As far as I know, SL6 is still not as close to RHEL6 as CentOS 6 will be. And, of course, there's Oracle 6. I was looking forward to using it, as we have purchased licenses from Oracle, but, as of Feb 22 anyway, when we did the installation, Oracle support told us they did not support Oracle Database 11G on Oracle Linux 6.

(They said it would be soon, but they had no time frame. )

[AndrewSerk]

F15, it's still to early to say for sure, but we still have a good 8-10 months before F14 goes EOL. By then, RHEL 6.1 should be out and ported to the clones, rpmfusion should have the RHEL 6 packages worked out, and we will have to make the decision what to use.
As of now, I plan on switching my machines that now run CentOS to SL, and for the computers I now have Fedora on, well I will have to wait and see where gnome ends up before I make that decision.

Time will tell

[vallimar]

As things currently stand, classic gnome or legacy gnome or whatever they call the fallback mode is
only somewhat a resemblance of Gnome2. You still only have the lacking configuration options of
gnome-shell, are stuck without a nautilus desktop browser, are also stuck with the presently non-
existant options for gtk3 themes, not that there is a gui to change them even if there were.

You really only get back the old menu, panel and panel-applets, what remains of them anyways.
You can get some metacity theme-ability back by hand tweaking gconf settings but it's not friendly.

---------- Post added at 03:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:56 PM ----------

I'm currently running F15 with most gnome-bits from F14 and it works pretty well. Also just updated to
latest Nvidia 270.29 drivers and the fresh Xorg 1.10 from F16. Also, on a lark, I rebuilt the old gdm 2.20.11
(last with the gdmsetup/theme code) with a few patches and it seems to work. No plymouth support or smooth
transitions since it never supported those, but it works otherwise though I didn't test the session switching
stuff yet. An enterprising coder could probably backport some of the eyecandy fluff but that is beyond my means.

I like to keep fairly up-to-date with packages, so not sure another distro would work for me. I may
just have to proceed with rebuilding all the gnome2 stuff myself and bumping the epoch so upstream
won't try to clobber them.

[smr54]

@vallimar, thank you for clarifying. At Bob, apologies for false information. I don't use Gnome myself, so didn't realize how different fallback is from what people are used to using.