FC4 Mini Review
I installed Redhat’s Fedora Core 4 on a few machines this week. Overall I’m impressed by the progress made by the various teams involved (Gnome, Kernel, DBus/HAL, Fedora packaging, and so on), and the resulting platform is superb.
A few screenshots
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| Left to right: base desktop (task-list panel removed), Open Office 2 (beta), a few sticky notes, Nautilus in browser mode, advanced configuration tool, and the fonts preferences dialog. The default background was replaced with a cooler one from www.gnome-look.org. |
The installation was painless, which is significant progress from a few years ago. The process is now far better Windows XP even, as the various teams have been able to include more drivers by default and optimize the overall install time (reducing reboots and including all of the useful software on the distribution media). The installation was even seamless on my laptop (HP Pavilion ze5400), with one small exception.
It took about half an hour to install FC4 on both systems from DVD. The initial wizard screens took less than 5 minutes to complete, while the remaining time was required to copy the system off of the media. While the install process hasn’t visibly changed from previous releases, hardware support (detection and configuration) has vastly improved.
I found one bug while installing on my laptop, the wireless NIC (eth1) was incorrectly identified as an Ethernet connection (instead of Wireless), which caused the network configuration tools to hide the Wireless Settings tab. The fix was a simple text change, and was reported as already fixed in Redhat’s Bugzilla bug database.
The Bluecurve theme has been tweaked in this release, with several noticeable improvements. Active tabs, in tab controls, are now highlighted in a more obvious way, as are menu highlights. Control containers are a now bit bolder, making most dialog work flow more obvious. The window decoration controls are a bit tighter too, making it easier to hit the intended buttons.
The Gnome team has fixed several usability problems in 2.10. The most obvious improvement is in the menu navigation logic, which now allows for sloppy mousing (without closing menus). All of the base Gnome applications have seen a lot of usability love as well, including the desktop games, which have all been upgraded to use SVG (vector) artwork, as well as now sharing a great deal of common code.
The Fedora packaging team has taken the time to clean up the system menus too, making them much easier to work with. Unlike Microsoft in their NT4 to 2000 and 2000 to XP upgrades, FC4’s menu clean-up didn’t result in the same level of confusion — even though the changes are significant.
Both preferences and system settings have been moved to the Desktop menu, leaving the Applications menu filled with only applications. The Places menu was also added, which provides central access to common local folders, network connections, and the search tool.
FC4 now includes a beta Open Office 2.0, which is at least as stable as Word 2000. I previously used Crossover Office to run the Microsoft Office 2000 suite, but this time around I’m going to give the updated OpenOffice.org applications another chance. Of the improvements that I’ve noticed so far: startup time is improved (first startup is under 10s, subsequent startups are under 3s), integration Gnome is more complete (theme, icons, dialogs, mime-types), and all of the applications feel ‘tighter’.
Day-to-day use of FC4 is as stable as Fc3, and somewhat more productive. The infrastructure improvements (like HAL and DBus) are really starting to pay off, especially for removable storage, scanners, and motherboard monitoring. With progress like this under the hood, I expect that the next few releases of Gnome (in any distribution) will only get better.
Overall Fc4 is a strong upgrade over previous Fedora releases. Based on the sensible direction of the Redhat, Gnome, Kernel, and individual application teams, it’s a great system for software development and office administration tasks. I’m not sure what criteria people are using to say that Gnu/Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, but for my uses it’s far better than Windows XP already.