My Fedora 21 experience

[Flemur]

I installed Fedora 21 to see what it was like.

The fedora website had a choice of "desktop", "server" & "cloud" versions, I picked "desktop", no choice of DE, which wasn't even mentioned.

Installer:
Very slow to boot up. DVD was silent for long periods - is it stuck?
Installing boot-loader was optional (yay!).
Nice clean interface with minimal feedback or information (boo!).
Progress meter sat at 100% for quite a long time - is it stuck?
Instructions for completing the install didn't match how it worked (reboot/removing the install media, etc).

Desktop:
It's Gnome 3, I guess, couldn't find a name for it anywhere.

It was pretty awful - complicated and not user-friendly at all. Nearly useless task-bar with no menu and didn't show running apps. Nice icons, though! (big deal).
Edit: dunno what the file manager was (No "Help->About"), but couldn't set it to display "Detailed list" by default, in fact there was no clear access to any Preferences settings.

Playing around with the settings (gnome-tweak-tool) I hit a desktop "zoom/scale" thing that made the 'tweak' interface too big for the screen (it reacted so slowly that I hit it twice), so couldn't set it back until googling: answer = hold some weird key while moving the window. All windows and text, etc, were *WAY* too big.

The gnome-tweak-tool had a search function that would've solved the problem, but searching for "zoom", "scale" and "size" didn't find the setting because it was called..."scaling", which, of course, is completely different from "scale"! &^%$#*

Click the stupidly labeled "Activities" button --> showed a dock with a few apps: firefox, file manager, but no terminal by default(!). Dock is on left side, virtual-desktop selector is on right side...back-and-forth to do most things.

Some fiddling to get a terminal up, do the same thing again to open another term and it takes you to the first one rather than opening a new one...sigh.

Updates:
It wanted to DL 700M of updates - install disk was about 1 week old. Ended up with linux 3.17 --> 3.18.

I installed fluxbox, but it didn't show up in the "session" selection of gdm, which seemed as bad as the rest of the Gnome desktop: slick and fancy looking, silly unhelpful GUI w/no "session" selection, so...

I installed lightdm, but the installer didn't "activate" as happens in Mint = if you install a new display/session manager, the installer asks which one you want to use. Fedora silently left the old one in place...Mint is always nicer!

Got lightdm running via systemd, it worked OK and gave a choice of two gnome desktops (new and trad, or some such; gdm never showed any choice) and fluxbox, which was the right answer.

"yum" was OK, about like "apt-get". "yumex" (GUI for yum, like synaptic) looked nice, but after a few uses it hung up and quit working** - no error messages and no 'cancel' button.
**Solution: run it as root, which you're "not supposed to do" (and which doesn't make much sense because when you run it as a normal user the first thing it does is ask for root password...).

Telling yumex what you want to do to a package is too subtle: you select a package, and if it's installed the selection means "uninstall", otherwise it means "install", but you don't explicitly see those words anywhere.

Have to add repositories to play mp3 files...sigh. Conflicting instructions on what's needed vs all the extra stuff.

Booted to linux 3.18, followed instructions to install nvidia (340) drivers, rebooted; drivers not running. Sigh.
Pretty slow boot, too: around 35 sec.

Summary: Just about every step was buggy and/or user-unfriendly: end of experiment!

[BigEasy]

I use Fedora for 3 years. Very usable and stable system. Working fast. Yes, it is not as usable and as fast as Mint is
But Mint is unique and Fedora is usual ! Same thing (usual) I can say about many other distros - OpenSUSE, for example.
I hate Gnome 3 as well. Because that I installed XFCE on it. No problem, no conflicts with native Gnome 3 existing in system.
Codecs? Yes, Fedora come with no codecs. Codecs anyone can install later easily.
In short: yes, Fedora little more complicated to install comparing to Mint. Booted 1.5 times longer, working almost as fast as Mint (in case XFCE). Once installed and tuned then anyone can forgot what system in front of him. Ah, yum and yumex main differences! No single problem during 3 years.

[Flemur]

Ah, yum and yumex main differences!

Package managers seem to be the biggest difference between distros.

Installing the nvidia drivers made the boot hang, with a "helpful" msg saying something like "Starting waiting for plymouth to stop" (plymouth is generally a trouble-maker). But I could still login to a console and remove the drivers, then rebooted (about 35-40 sec); got the boot time down to 20-22 sec (from grub prompt --> desktop w/autologin, not the fake systemd-analyze time) by:

Code: Select all

systemctl mask NetworkManager-wait-online.service
systemctl mask systemd-journal-flush.service
systemctl mask  ModemManager.service

The first just waits for the network to start.
The last is for wifi, which I don't have.
Dunno what the middle one does, but it was slow.

I'm posting this from fedora (is that legal?) Anyway, I kinda like systemd - fortunately I'm too ignorant to know how horrible it is!


Edit: no audio. The obvious solution, or a step toward a solution, is to remove pulseaudio.
Yum says all these things depend on pulseaudio...though I was able to reinstall almost all of them without reinstalling pulseaudio.

IOW, "yum" isn't ready for prime-time.

Code: Select all

yum install  thunar                      
yum install  abrt-desktop                
yum install  abrt-gui                   
yum install  alsa-plugins-pulseaudio  
yum install  anaconda                 
yum install  anaconda-gui            
yum install  brasero-libs           
yum install  control-center        
yum install  empathy              
yum install  epiphany-runtime    
yum install  evince-nautilus    
yum install  file-roller       
yum install  file-roller-nautilus  
yum install  gedit                                      
yum install  gnome-bluetooth                           
yum install  gnome-classic-session                    
yum install  gnome-contacts                          
yum install  gnome-disk-utility                     
yum install  gnome-initial-setup                   
yum install  gnome-packagekit                     
yum install  gnome-settings-daemon               
yum install  gnome-shell                        
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-alternate-tab           
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-apps-menu              
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-background-logo       
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-common               
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-launch-new-instance 
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-places-menu        
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-user-theme        
yum install  gnome-shell-extension-window-list      
yum install  gnome-software                        
yum install  gnome-tweak-tool                     
yum install  gnome-user-share                              
yum install  ibus                                         
yum install  ibus-chewing                                
yum install  ibus-gtk2                                  
yum install  ibus-gtk3                                 
yum install  ibus-hangul                              
yum install  ibus-kkc                                
yum install  ibus-libpinyin                         
yum install  ibus-m17n                             
yum install  ibus-rawcode                         
yum install  ibus-setup                          
yum install  ibus-typing-booster                
yum install  ibus-wayland                      
yum install  libnotify                        
yum install  mutter                                        
yum install  nautilus                                     
yum install  nautilus-extensions                         
yum install  rhythmbox                               
yum install  setroubleshoot                         
yum install  totem-nautilus                        
yum install  vino                                 
yum install  zenity