It’s a tiny bit ironic that a day after I harass high-end distros for possibly lowering the bar too much, I show a screenshot of Fedora 15.
I can’t explain why, but I was actually a little bit excited by the prospect of looking at this.
I’m not a Fedora user at all. I grew up (so to speak) in the Ubuntu camp, and while I’ve never really embraced the Red Hat sphere, it certainly never lost points for me.
What can I tell you that you can’t see in the picture, or by booting up the live ISO? It’s blue. It’s clean. The fonts are SO SHARP THEY CUT MY EYES! 😯
I haven’t run into many problems yet, aside from some glitches with keyboard layout settings that were easily overcome after a moment at the command line.
Not bad though. I might install it for a while on the guinea pig, and give it an equal shake to what Ubuntu got.
The big question is, is this desktop much different than Unity? Not in my estimation. Lots of shiny buttons and flipping composite windows. Glossy and glittery, as is the trend.
I don’t dislike it, at least not any more than Ubuntu’s desktop. But if I have more to say, I’ll be sure to post it in the vein of this. 😉
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Is gnome 3 fast?
While you’re trying out ‘high-end’ distros, you might want to give Linux Mint 11 a go. It’s based on old fashioned Gnome 2 but I think they’ve made all the right decisions with the implementation.
It’s replaced Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop which has been too buggy to be usable (I won’t bore you with a list…). I do run ‘low-end’ distros as well, but I prefer to have something that requires no thought on my laptop which is my primary machine for work.
Fedora KDE user here. Was surprised to see this on your blog.
It’s worth noting that there is an XFCE version of Fedora readily available, which isn’t bad — I think it’s a bit lighter than Xubuntu, going subjectively.
You can also do a minimal install of Fedora from any live or install disk, by opening up a terminal and doing “anaconda –text”, which is good to know. You’ll need to do any partitioning beforehand though.
I downloaded and tried F15 few days ago because a fellow archer told me “GNOME 3 implementation is pretty good, you gotta look at it” (I’m myself a tty[tmux and everything else]/KDE/Awesome guy) – may be because GNOME 3 is still green -indeed it is-, maybe because Fedora’s port isn’t such great but overall I couldn’t stand it for more than 1 minutes, what a waste of a good DVD 😛
You could use DVD-RW or even USB stick.
LOL.
You might also want to look at Fuduntu (http://www.fuduntu.org/) – it’s based on F14 but has been heavily tweaked for laptops (in particular for speed & powersaving), and has been designed to look and behave a lot like Ubuntu (hence the name).
Had Fedora 15 on my laptop for a few days just to try Gnome 3 and I think it’s pretty good on the whole. While not perfect, it’s only going to get better and mature into a real nice modern desktop.
Personally, I have now taken it off my laptop now as I don’t like the Fedora package management and all the crap they add to the install.
I will probably now wait until the 3.2 release later this year to try this out for real on either Arch or Debian. Just hope a few more distro’s have a Gnome 3 release by then.
I’ve been reading F15 reviews and have seen Gnome 3 repeatedly referred to as a “modern” desktop. With furniture/architecture there are recognizable styles, like Danish Modern, Victorian, etc. There are also recognizable computer desktop styles such as Mac, W95 and successors, and NetBook.
But I don’t see anything distinctive about Gnome 3 – except that it requires hardware 3D graphics capability. MS Windows V1.0 had tiled windows so they’re certainly not new. And there are NetBook-like aspects of the G3 desktop.
Back in the 1930s, a gentleman named Dvorak came up with an English language keyboard key layout that allowed for more efficient typing. But it never took hold because of the costs of retraining and retooling. I can see that individuals may choose to adapt to the changes in Gnome 3. But what about the (too few) companies that use desktop Linux?
I resurected an old notebook with the beta, and was thuroughly impressed. It runs very well, even on old hardware, with gnome-shell! I was really surprised that worked at all. Aover all I think its a great release.
Pingback: Links 30/5/2011: Linux 3.0 is Coming | Techrights
Why is it green if Fedora is blue? 😉
Anyway, here are my 2 cents about Fedora 15:
GNOME http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-with-gnome-3-better-than.html
KDE: http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-kde-when-new-old-is-better.html
After using Fedora15 in a production environment for a full week, I have come up with my own opinions… not that anyone cares.
Overall, I think that Gnome3 is sexy. The fancy graphics stuff is pretty neat, although I don’t think that it improves my productivity at all; in fact, it somewhat hinders it (IMHO). Not sure that Gnome3 is for me in its current state, but I’m sure that it will get better in time.
THINGS THAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT GNOME3/Fedora15:
– Can’t seem to customize a menu launcher; for instance, if I want for Terminator to open at a specific size (terminator –geometry 775×500), I was unable to find a way to change the properties of the launcher.
– MoCp and some other software that I like is not available for Fedora 15 through repos.
– Terminator only displays transparency when in full screen mode; background is black if the window is not expanded to full screen.
– I could not find an option to minimize a window, only maximize; you end up with a bunch of stacked windows since you cannot minimize anything that’s open.
– The default bar across the top of any window is really thick/wide/tall; takes up too much screen real estate.
– Sometimes extra software gets installed that I don’t want… not just libraries that are dependencies, but actual usable software; this seems to be the case mostly when installing KDE related software. Sure, if I install a KDE app, I can expect to install relative KDE library files, but I didn’t ask for a bunch of other KDE applications to be installed.
– Cannot switch between desktops with the mouse (as with Gnome2 using the panel switcher); you have to use keystrokes; this is not always convenient.
– Cannot create panel launchers; sure, you’ve got that nifty “favorites” menu on the left, but wouldn’t it be easier to click a button that’s at the top of your panel to open a favorite application rather than have to access the favorites bar and then select your desired application?
– The printer configuration in Fedora15 was not able to locate my network printing services. The user interface was less intuitive to me than the Ubuntu equivalent.
I think that its funny that as linux users we have gotten so used to having to mess with out desktop just to make it work it becomes a strange feeling when an interface kind of just works. Worse when it isn’t particularly customizable. Am I right?