Anyone tried FC3-test1?

[Michael Hipp]

Net Llama! wrote:
> What kind of issues are you having with FC2?  I've not tried FC3-test1.

- CD burning is largely broken. I can burn regular files but there is no 
option to verify after the burn. I can't burn isos (via the gui anyway, 
and the command for cdrecord that's supposed to work doesn't). Can't 
copy CDs either.

- Can't edit/add anything to the Gnome menus. Not without editing a 
hyper-complicated undocumented XML file anyways. And the pertinent files 
are scattered all across the fs and the documented locations are wrong. 
Found some of them by trial and error. (This has been broke for going on 
2 years BTW.)

- WM is broken. Doesn't give the proper hints to rdesktop to enable some 
of its more useful features. This is a bad loss to those of us who must 
remote admin lots of Win Server boxes.

- Printer sharing via Samba is broken. Can create the shares, Win boxes 
can see them but every attempt to connect produces "Access denied." No 
matter how loose the permissions. File sharing works fine.

- Can't autorun Mozilla & Mozilla Mail on startup. Putting them in the 
usual autorun locations produces profile conflicts. Checking the 'Run 
Mail & Newsgroups' in Moz preferences does nothing.

- The 'Network Servers' app just doesn't work. Can't get it to show my 
simple Workgroup network at all.

- Window placement out of the WM is really annoying. It seems to want to 
open everything in the upper left.

- The desktop icons don't obey their "keep aligned" directive.

- Many of the foo:/// shortcuts that are supposed to do magical things 
in Nautilus just don't work despite the documentation. The one I can't 
live without is man:///.

- The Gnome 'Configuration Editor' is beginning to look so much like 
Windows REGEDIT that it gives me the creeps. This is definitely *not* 
progress.

- And I'm ignoring for now, the fatal partitioning bug and the fact that 
the amd_64 version wouldn't install with more than 256M of memory (easy 
workaround once known by adding mem=256M to the boot line, but very 
annoying to get all the way through setup 3 times only to crash at the 
very end).

These may all be relatively little things taken by themselves, but as a 
whole it's adding up to an experience of every time I delve deeper into 
some new area I always find it doesn't work as expected. And it 
definitely means I can't recommend it to the many newbies asking "which 
distro" or "I wanna try Linux".

Worst part is, I've filed bugzilla reports on some of these and added to 
the "me too" chorus on others, but I don't see any evidence that 
RH/Fedora is addressing them. So I'm assuming (hoping?) their way of 
fixing them is by releasing FC3. I'm on the amd_64 version and I don't 
know how many of these are specific to same.

That all said, there is *MUCH* to like about FC2. The new Gnome with the 
controversial "spatial" settings is superb. A big leap forward IMO. 
RH/Fedora has done a great job with integration and visual consistency 
of the GUI. They've even managed to turn OpenOffice.org into an 
attractive app - no small feat. The system is blazingly fast and 
rock-solid stable. Gnome was unusable in most every past version of RH 
due to Nautilus crashing every few minutes -- it seems to be well fixed now.

Thanks,
Michael