What holiday is everyone celebrating?

[Michael Hipp]

keith morse wrote:
> I was curious as to the "insufferable bugs" you mention above.  What are 
>  some of them?

Below is the gist of a message I posted on 8/26 after about 2 weeks 
fighting the thing. Note that, as Lonnie pointed out in a followup to 
the thread, most of these are Gnome problems. But Gnome is the default 
and by far best supported desktop on FC so I can't just dismiss it as 
such. Note that it is possible some of these bugs/problems/shortcomings 
are specific to the amd_64 version I was using. But anyway I've had to 
abandon it for now so I could get some work done.

Michael

Note #1: One of the items below ("Network servers app just doesn't 
work") appears to have been fixed somewhere along the way, at least it 
works on one of my LabRat machines that is running a fully updated 
version of FC2-i386.

Note #2: The last paragraph "Nautilus crashing" that I reported as fixed 
may have been too hasty. The more I worked with it the more unstable it 
seemed to become.

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- 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.
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