I have a buddy Craig who retired not long ago and has always been a true nerd at heart no matter how hard his job at Kaiser stressed him out. Craig loves to tinker and is great at it. He was also great at every thing he would do in his carrier while at Kaiser but he just let it get under his skin to much if you ask me.
Well the other day Craig (who I have been trying to get into blogging) decided to move off of Ubuntu for a couple of days and try the new Fedora 15. The rest of this post is his comparison of the two. This is just from an email to me but he should really be posting his rants for the world to read.So, after using F15 for a few days now, I have some observations to share.The Ubuntu Unity desktop in my opinion is still a better choice for small screen machines like the HP Mini because it puts the application menu toolbar (File-Edit-View… ) directly into the status bar at the top of the screen. This saves at least 30 pixels of vertical screen space, a scarce commodity on a screen that measures only 600 total vertical pixels on a typical netbook. The Gnome 3 Shell is far better suited to desktop management on larger laptops or desktops. Gnome 3 on a netbook screen is cluttered and switching from screen to screen by moving the cursor to the upper left corner of the display to force an “expose” like desktop view is pain in the keester. Furthermore, Gnome 3 doesn’t always check for the screen size, yielding an application display window that exceeds the size of the screen without a way to resize it leaving the “okay” or “accept” buttons out of reach beyond the bottom of the screen. I like the Gnome 3 shell well enough though to put it on my 17″ Dell monstrosity when I return home. Although, I’m still wary that Gnome 3 might not even be the best choice for my 14.5″ Asus (my main laptop these days.)
<rantmode>The rant is about Gnome 3 itself, not specific to Fedora. As we Linux people are prone to do, I immediately set about playing with the look and feel of the interface. I have some clear preferences about how I want my desktop to look. (I like a particular window border style, I hate blue themes, etc.) So, I set about looking for a way to modify the theme settings to suit my finely hone preferences developed over 15 years of continuous Linux use. My first discovery was … it ain’t easy to modify Gnome 3 using the default tools provided. I had to go on a treasure hunt for the tweak tools and Gnome 3 extensions that allow the modification of the desktop. In my poking around I ran across an article from the Gnome 3 developers responding to comments from other Linux users who share my complaint about lack of configuration options. The Gnome 3 developers … get this … would “prefer to keep user configuration of Gnome 3 to a minimum to make the Gnome 3 desktop more user recognizable and immediately identifiable like the Windows and the Mac interfaces are.” The Gnome 3 developers have *deliberately* hidden the tweak tools, limiting all access of look and feel changes exclusively to the initiated, experienced, die hard Linux veteran. (e.g. I had to manually edit and move modified Metacity files directly into the /usr/share/themes directory to implement changes to the window borders. Your average newbie won’t have a clue how to go about doing that.) Has the Linux community now degenerated to this Eric? If so, I’m somewhat dismayed. Locking down the configuration of Gnome 3 in the mold of Apple and Microsoft brand identification strategy just makes me wanna puke. On the other hand, maybe forcing the Linux user interface back into a manually edited XML file function is a good thing. It keeps the riff-raff from mucking about with things they don’t understand. That’s the way it was in 1995 when I first started using Linux. But if the LInux community is serious about World Domination of the Desktop, this is a bad way to go.</rantmode>
I think we both agree that the Ubuntu installer is nearly flawless for the newbie. I’ve recommended it my non-technical family members with good results. Fedora 15 on the other hand would be a nightmare for your non-techie friends and family. Fedora 15 repositories are completely lacking in the RPM packages for non-free, proprietary or restricted packages. Where in Ubuntu you could just install the restricted extras packages and the Broadcom proprietary drivers are detected automagically, in Fedora one needs to use a wired connection to access http://rpmfusion.org and download Broadcom restricted drivers to even get wireless working. For you and me, that’s okay, but my relatives would be on the phone with me immediately.All the minor rants aside, I’m pretty happy being a crash test dummy with Fedora 15. One of my early complaints with Red Hat and the Fedora Core Project from a couple of years ago centered on some significant RPM dependency issues where installing one package would break one or more others. That now seems to have been addressed and fixed. I haven’t found anything yet that doesn’t work and dependency testing BEFORE the package is installed seems to be consistent and comprehensive. That said, I still much prefer the apt-get package management in Debian based systems over the much slower RPM system used by Fedora. Searching for a known package in Fedora can take up to a minute sometimes, and results are returned using a sorted listing I still can’t fully grok.You might want to experiment around with F15 in your copious spare time, but I can’t recommend it for your HP Mini.