Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

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asdfasdf

Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by asdfasdf »

KBD47 wrote:Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE
http://kbd-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.com ... 7-kde.html
I have been primarily a Fedora user over the years. Yet I am down to just my last Fedora 17 desktop (and it's using KDE, not that disgusting Gnome 3 tripe), *every other desktop I use* having gone to Linux Mint 13 or LMDE.

I was sick and tired of the alpha-minus-minus software that the Fedora project team was allowing a particular developer to keep throwing into the distribution. That software should have much more widely tested rather than being allowed right into the mainline of the distribution without adequate testing. I don't mind "release early and release often", but such releases should not be straight into the mainline of the distribution. The ideas behind systemd and PulseAudio aren't bad; indeed, some of the technical decisions are quite clever. But the venue for testing such new work should be in a q.a. environment, and not by the general user community.

The Fedora engineers also push out a *lot* of kernels, too, and surprisingly frequent updates to libc. This means (1) dkms gets lots of exercise if you use VirtualBox; (2) existing Firefox processes usually become quite squirrelly after a libc update; and (3) if you only reboot your desktop infrequently, you will want to change the default 3 kernels retained by yum to (at least) 5 --- also, your boot partition on a Fedora installation should be at least 2 gigabytes, and definitely not the much smaller default value.

Then, of course, since Fedora 15, the fonts have become incredibly spindly and downright ugly on most display devices (though they usually look okay on netbooks and smaller devices.) I have wasted a lot of time trying to tweak these into something that looks even half as nice as a normal Linux Mint installation; infinality mostly works, but it is very intrusive and touches far too many packages for my comfort.

I also saw some discussion about preupgrade in this thread. While preupgrade usually works well enough, it doesn't always and when it doesn't, it usually leaves the machine in a pretty ugly state. Also, important to note is that while a normal full Fedora installation does support software raid with mdadm, preupgrade does not. If you do set up software raid during a normal installation, you will have to go through full installation each and every time you upgrade (i.e., no preupgrade for you), and sometimes this type of installation over existing software RAID is a very poorly tested area.

Even standard, stable software like TeX often languishes far behind other distributions. (Though I have to give the Fedora folks much credit for getting Gimp 2.8 into Fedora 17.)

But the final straw for me was the recent decision by the engineering group that beginning with Fedora 18 that Fedora will, by default, and just like Microsoft Windows, feature "offline updates". See http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/ ... 21811.html and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features ... temUpdates. This seems to me, after the lamentable decisions about Gnome 3 and default font appearance, to be the final straw. (Also, I am no great fan of their UEFI secure boot decision, though I realize that Microsoft is playing very hard ball on this issue. Still it seems to me that the Fedora group folded pretty quickly on this issue. At least Canonical made a more principled stand on UEFI secure boot in my opinion.)
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

linuxviolin wrote:Hey guys, it's just my experience... On my desktop the things work well but I can't say on every Linux box this will be mandatory the same thing... PreUpgrade is a great tool which worked very well on my desktop at every time I used it but there are also surely people who have had problems with it. You'll have to try it by yourself to see if it's the same good process on your Linux box. :wink:
Warning taken :-) I went ahead and installed it to my computer hard drive tonight. I really like Fedora's installer and how quick it installs. Probably won't be the primary system I use on my multi-boot computer, but I am enjoying it.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

asdfasdf, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't like the sound of the new update system either. But it sounds like yum update will still work.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

BTW guys here is the fix I used to vastly improve Fedora's fonts:
http://jaysonrowe.blogspot.com/2012/06/ ... ering.html
Fonts are a big deal to me. If fonts are really bad in an OS I won't use it. My eyes aren't what they once were and bad fonts really irritate them. I usually set the system fonts to deja vu bold, but Firefox and Thunderbird fonts need more tweaking in Fedora. With the fix above they are quite nice.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by linuxviolin »

asdfasdf wrote:I have been primarily a Fedora user over the years. Yet I am down to just my last Fedora 17 desktop (and it's using KDE, not that disgusting Gnome 3 tripe), *every other desktop I use* having gone to Linux Mint 13 or LMDE.

I was sick and tired of the alpha-minus-minus software that the Fedora project team was allowing a particular developer to keep throwing into the distribution. That software should have much more widely tested rather than being allowed right into the mainline of the distribution without adequate testing. I don't mind "release early and release often", but such releases should not be straight into the mainline of the distribution. The ideas behind systemd and PulseAudio aren't bad; indeed, some of the technical decisions are quite clever. But the venue for testing such new work should be in a q.a. environment, and not by the general user community.

The Fedora engineers also push out a *lot* of kernels, too, and surprisingly frequent updates to libc. This means (1) dkms gets lots of exercise if you use VirtualBox; (2) existing Firefox processes usually become quite squirrelly after a libc update; and (3) if you only reboot your desktop infrequently, you will want to change the default 3 kernels retained by yum to (at least) 5 --- also, your boot partition on a Fedora installation should be at least 2 gigabytes, and definitely not the much smaller default value.
I can be wrong but your words sound like if you don't understand what is fedora. Fedora is not really for the same target than Ubuntu/Mint, to quote just these two.

Yes, it is what you said. But Fedora is one of the most innovative distributions available today, and also, as such, obviously there are sometimes issues. You must know that and be ready before installing it.

DistroWatch has a not bad description of Fedora:
In 2003, just after the release of Red Hat Linux 9, the company introduced some radical changes to its product line-up. It retained the Red Hat trademark for its commercial products, notably Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and introduced Fedora Core (later renamed to Fedora), a Red Hat-sponsored, but community-oriented distribution designed for the "Linux hobbyist". After the initial criticism of the changes, the Linux community accepted the "new" distribution as a logical continuation of Red Hat Linux. A few quality releases was all it took for Fedora to regain its former status as one of the best-loved operating systems on the market. At the same time, Red Hat quickly became the biggest and most profitable Linux company in the world, with an innovative product line-up, excellent customer support, and other popular initiatives, such as its Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification programme.

Although Fedora's direction is still largely controlled by Red Hat, Inc. and the product is sometimes seen -- rightly or wrongly -- as a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there is no denying that Fedora is one of the most innovative distributions available today. Its contributions to the Linux kernel, glibc and GCC are well-known and its more recent integration of SELinux functionality, virtualisation technologies, Systemd service manager, cutting-edge journaled file systems, and other enterprise-level features are much appreciated among the company's customers. On a negative side, Fedora still lacks a clear desktop-oriented strategy that would make the product easier to use for those beyond the "Linux hobbyist" target.

Pros: Highly innovative; outstanding security features; large number of supported packages; strict adherence to the free software philosophy; availability of live CDs featuring many popular desktop environments
Cons: Fedora's priorities tend to lean towards enterprise features, rather than desktop usability; some bleeding edge features, such as early switch to KDE 4 and GNOME 3, occasionally alienate some desktop users
It is probably not a distro for the "general public", it is not ready made, turn-key etc as can be Mint for instance. And, as said well DistroWatch, it targets developers, professional or "Linux hobbyist" and people with some knowledge. It is NOT a "general public" distro and has not the same orientation than Mint at all. It's not by chance it is the Distro used by Linus...

EDIT: About "a *lot* of kernels", maybe yes there are kernel updates, more than in some distros and more than in Mint. But I have had no real problem for now with the kernels and just keep the new kernel and the previous, i.e. the one you used before the kernel update and which works, is necessary and useful. No other kernel is necessary. You have just to use the command, as root: package-cleanup --oldkernels to make this quite simply and easily.

And no, you have no need for a /boot partition "at least 2 gigabytes, and definitely not the much smaller default value". For instance, my /boot partition is 320Mb and with two kernels installed, as I said, 68,56 MB are used. So, it has 251,44 Mb unused space. And with this I have no problem with PreUpgrade neither with other thing!
asdfasdf wrote:Then, of course, since Fedora 15, the fonts have become incredibly spindly and downright ugly on most display devices (though they usually look okay on netbooks and smaller devices.) I have wasted a lot of time trying to tweak these into something that looks even half as nice as a normal Linux Mint installation; infinality mostly works, but it is very intrusive and touches far too many packages for my comfort.
Well, I never had some problem with fonts in Fedora. I always use the DejaVu font family in every distro. And you can improve them with the freetype-freeworld package if you want: "I think freetype-freeworld is technically closer to what Ubuntu/Mint uses", from your link, KBD47. :-)
asdfasdf wrote:I also saw some discussion about preupgrade in this thread. While preupgrade usually works well enough, it doesn't always and when it doesn't, it usually leaves the machine in a pretty ugly state. Also, important to note is that while a normal full Fedora installation does support software raid with mdadm, preupgrade does not. If you do set up software raid during a normal installation, you will have to go through full installation each and every time you upgrade (i.e., no preupgrade for you), and sometimes this type of installation over existing software RAID is a very poorly tested area.
Yes, you can't use PreUpgrade if your /boot partition is on RAID. It's the only limitation. BTW, this is the first thing which is said in the PreUpgrade guide page:
Prerequisites

Your system cannot be upgraded with preupgrade if any of the following apply:

1. If your /boot partition is on RAID. See bug 500004.
And as I said, PreUgrade worked always well for me on my desktop version after version. Some time ago now I have not made a reinstall of Fedora on this box but just used PreUpgrade without problem, 14 to 15 to 16 to 17... Oh also I don't use RAID and/or LVM.

But as I said, it's just my experience and even if it is excellent for me on this box for now, there are also surely people who have had problems with it... Nothing is perfect and nothing is mandatory the same for everybody and/or every box.
Last edited by linuxviolin on Mon Jul 09, 2012 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by MALsPa »

Yeah, I can think of a lot reasons why someone might not want to run Fedora, even though it's one of my favorite distros to use. When you consider how they go about doing things, it's kinda amazing that they manage to produce such quality releases. But like any distro, Fedora has its pros and cons. The things linuxviolin mentoned are good things for someone to take note of before deciding to use this distro.

My experiences with Fedora don't go back a long way, but I ran F14 and F15 each for a whole year, and I have both F16 and F17 running here now. Fedora's been great here, and I have no intention of stopping with Fedora 17. Having said that, if I was going to run only one distro here, I don't think I'd choose Fedora; I'd pick something a bit less experimental.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by Fandangio »

That was a good read, how has your experience with Fedora been over the past week?
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

Fandangio wrote:That was a good read, how has your experience with Fedora been over the past week?
Thanks :-) I'm actually liking Fedora way more than I expected to. yum update seems easier to me than: sudo apt-get update / sudo apt-get upgrade. There are really not a lot of major differences, it's all Linux. Fedora needs more effort out of the box to download apps that come with some other distros up front. Like with Debian you can easily get the true type fonts from the repo, but have to go looking around with Fedora. But once it's set up, it seems pretty solid to me.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by Fandangio »

KBD47 wrote:it's all Linux.
That's something that has occurred to me after trying Chakra and Sabayon9. For me it is the DE that is more important than the base.
Admittedly I have fairly basic computing needs but the user interface is of most importance. I've tried Unity (still have it installed on a PC in my bedroom) and it's fine for watching films, tried Gnome shell (on Fedora), Cinammon and others, but for me KDE is the most customisable, has the best features and is the most productive DE.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

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Fandangio, that's what I think. It's becoming more and more about the user interface than the underlying operating system.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

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I don't know; for me, if it's Linux underneath, it doesn't much matter which desktop environment I'm using.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

MALsPa wrote:I don't know; for me, if it's Linux underneath, it doesn't much matter which desktop environment I'm using.
I think over time it matters more to me. I was using Xubuntu the other day on a desktop computer with a 15 inch monitor and realized I couldn't read a thing on it. On a laptop close to the screen I like Xfce, but not on a desktop with a mouse squinting at the small icons and small text, same for LXDE. I also realized with LXDE I needed to install Xfce apps to make it usable. I've concluded that there are about three Linux desktops I can tolerate depending upon the hardware I run: KDE (my favorite), Gnome 2 types (Classic/Fallback), and Unity 2d (my least favorite). I dont mind Xfce on a laptop. Unity is only tolerable once I 'fix' everything, like removing overlay scrollbars and global menu and adding Ubuntu Tweak. Out of the box KDE is my favorite.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

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MALsPa wrote:The things linuxviolin mentoned are good things for someone to take note of before deciding to use this distro.
Oh thanks! :D
KBD47 wrote:yum update seems easier to me than: sudo apt-get update / sudo apt-get upgrade.
Well, it's true the Yum commands are easy to remember and quite simple... yum update, yum search, yum localinstall, yum install etc very simple and natural. Even someone who never used Yum can find them with little thought.
KBD47 wrote:Fedora needs more effort out of the box to download apps that come with some other distros up front. Like with Debian you can easily get the true type fonts from the repo, but have to go looking around with Fedora. But once it's set up, it seems pretty solid to me.
Yes. BTW, DistroWatch in its Fedora 17 review says also that:
What my experience this week really boiled down to was I spent a lot of time up front getting Fedora arranged the way I wanted it -- after the initial install, I applied over 90 updates, turned off various effects, disabled indexing and workspace features, tracked down three third-party repositories and spent a few hours downloading all of the pieces of software and codecs I wanted. In short, it's a more involved process than the install-and-go experience I usually have with big name distributions. However, once everything was in place I found Fedora to be a solid, cutting-edge distribution with useful tools, good documentation and an active forum community. The administration tools in particular are quite good, Apper provided a better package management experience than I usually have on RPM-based distributions and the security improvements (as provided by SELinux and systemd) didn't get in the way. It may take a little while to get Fedora 17 to a point where it feels comfortable, but it's a good platform once the furniture is rearranged.
This is perfectly true! :D

As I said above, "it is probably not a distro for the "general public", it is not ready made, turn-key etc as can be Mint for instance. And, as said well DistroWatch, it targets developers, professional or "Linux hobbyist" and people with some knowledge. It is NOT a "general public" distro and has not the same orientation than Mint at all. It's also not by chance it is the Distro used by Linus..." But when you understand that and do the work, it's a relatively good platform. Just a warning all the same, don't touch to Rawhide. Feodra can be a bit "experimental", as said MALsPa, so Rawhide is, well... :roll: It can be really unstable. You must be a user with good knowledges to use it. Really.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by KBD47 »

Linuxviolin, that Distrowatch review nailed it. I think the only way I would recommend Fedora to a newbie would be if their hardware had to have it, if none of the newbie distros were up with their hardware. But for someone familiar with Linux it is well worth checking out.
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by linuxviolin »

KBD47 wrote:But for someone familiar with Linux it is well worth checking out.
I don't say the contrary. :-)
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by MALsPa »

I've never heard of anyone recommending Fedora to a newbie, though.
Fandangio

Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by Fandangio »

MALsPa wrote:I've never heard of anyone recommending Fedora to a newbie, though.
I tried it as a newb and needless to say failed miserably! Went running off to Kubuntu and got the KDE bug then and there :)
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Re: Thinking About Fedora 17 KDE

Post by The Dark Side »

Fedora 17 KDE is not so bad. I've tried a few weeks and it really works much better than its direct rival (OpenSuse). Of course, next to Linux Mint KDE, Kubuntu or Mageia falls far short, and is not as stable as I mentioned distributions. Let it bring Fedora 18 (which actually comes quite late and has had serious problems). Greetings.
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