Fedora 7 Test 2, my experiences

[cowlip]

I just downloaded this and loaded the live cd--which now has an install like Ubuntu--in VirtualBox and I was extremely impressed. The desktop is beautiful, great wallpaper, and the package manager is only one program, as opposed to separate ones like gnome-app-install and synaptic. Fedora also has GUI tools that Ubuntu lacks--and needs, IMO-- like Samba (smbpasswd goodbye!) and LVM. I love the unique mouse cursor icons, which is part of the "Echo" icon pack for the desktop. Fedora also has *excellent* font smoothing (unlike Debian and the son, Ubuntu), which makes everything very pleasant to use. Fedora 7 has many of the same packages as Ubuntu, including new packages like ntfs-3g and ntfs-config. Also, they don't include binary blobs which is a plus for me, and I hear they will package Nouveau for Nvidia cards ASAP.

On the downside, yum is still slow as molasses so it's not as nice as apt-get, although I hear there are improvements being made on that front. Also, I still feel discouraged to actually install Fedora because it seems there's nothing like dist-upgrade or update-manager to upgrade your system to the newest version without breaking it.

The last time I used Fedora was as one of my first Linuxes, Fedora Core 2, and I hated it. I think I would have a very diferent opinion of Fedora had Fedora 7 existed instead.

Screenshots from Phoronix

(I know Test 3 is out but I had already download Test 2. BTW I'm trying very hard to not say "Fedora Core" )

[karellen]

I've used FC 5 for a couple of months and it was overall an ok experience, the only downside being yum (slow and not so great dependency solver like apt-get/aptitude). and speaking about the name, yeap, I got very used to "Fedora Core", simply "Fedora" doesn't sound that good