I upgraded to Fedora 15 the day it came out and have a few thoughts on the matter.
Preupgrade
The official Fedora documentation recommends using the “preupgrade” package to upgrade from Fedora 14. Don’t do it. It blew up and I had to spend 2 hours manually resolving the issues that it caused.
Gnome Shell
Gnome shell has a lot of interesting features but I have so far found it unfamiliar and difficult to get familiar with as I am now missing IMs and multiple workspaces, as well as Compiz-fusion. I don’t like the lack of customization that it seems to present to me thus far.
I do enjoy the Windows key – quick type to start things, although if you already have a shell open and try to open a new shell (or any app), it will not allow you to do so without typing extra characters. Don’t assume that the user is an idiot, let me open two windows without extra work.
Also, fallback mode is crippling. These Gnome Shell folks need to provide a better option for lesser hardware.
More Ranting
Overall, I am more disappointed with each release of Fedora. The changes being made appear to be moving away from the important features that made Linux distributions fun to work with in the beginning, lots of user choice, command line requirements and text based installs, etc… The future appears to be less user choice and less responsibility for the user which is terrible.
Terrible features:
1. PackageKit
2. ConsoleKit
3. PolicyKit
4. The gap between rpm and yum – yum needs to embrace rpm and work together. Why aren’t there options to rollback and preserve packages? tsflags=repackage, repackage_all_erasures=true? The removal of these features really killed the Enterprise ready nature of the packaging system.
Leave a Reply