Fedora Core 6 review (Software In Review)

Fedora Core 6 review (Software In Review)

I guess the dude just ran into a combination of hardware that FC6 (or the kernel it uses) didn't like. It happens... but even with that he said some things I just didn't get:

1) It won't let you add other OSes to the grub boot menu - I imagine there might be some combos it doesn't recognise but for me it has always seen other OSes and added entries for them.

2) Conflicting repos... comflict. Who would have guessed?

3) Fedora Core doesn't support proprietary, patent encumbered multimedia codecs. DUH. That's a feature, not a bug. If you are waiting for a version of Fedora Core to do that, give up. <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems>

Now, having said that, it is easy enough to add one of the popular, third-party repos to get all of that.

4) Ubuntu is far from perfect... and supposedly 44% of recent upgraders had significant failures. I'm not trying to bad mouth Ubuntu but those are the facts. Want multiple desktops on Ubuntu? I installed the previous release of Ubuntu then added KDE and Xfce. The boot screen said one flavor, the graphics boot said another... and then the graphical login said the third. Why does supporting multiple desktop environments need separate sub-distro release projects? That must be one of their features rather than a bug.

Other comments to this article remind me of /. comments. Fedora Core is beta test only? Oh, really. Max Spevack (Fedora Project Leader) says that is the biggest myth he is trying to dispell.

What Red Hat Linux has always been... and Fedora Core after it... is an early adopter of technology... trying to get it as right as possible... and then getting wider use by the masses help weed out the bugs. As with Red Hat's sponsorship of kernel, gcc, Xorg, gnome, etc... development... they produce a lot and all of the other distros benefit. While Novell/SUSE has a few big developers too, no one currently matches Red Hat for their contributions to the community... yet they are constantly badmouthed. You don't like Fedora Core... ok fine... but give Red Hat and the Fedora developers props. In a way, that makes Fedora Core "beta-test" but not any more than a Red Hat Linux .0 release was. This means that the Fedora Core end user has to contribute more than your average distro user... with bug reports and feedback... that's the community part of community distro.

Fedora Core is one of the most actively developed distros out there. I mean, heck there are approximately 370 updates to the FC6 install media... and several more hundred updates to Extras... and there will be thousands over the lifetime of FC6. The vast majority aren't security fixes... but bug fixes and version updates... much of it coming from upstream. Where are the props for all of that work? I mean, they upgraded KDE 3.5.4 to 3.5.5 pretty quickly. How many KDE/GNOME upgrades have fallen within the lifecycle of FC5? Release early and often... ring a bell for anyone?

Sometimes it can be hard to keep up... but that is why Linux has been advancing so fast. Fedora is more of a multi-purpose distro than just a desktop distro. It has contained some major features for several releases that most other distros will probably never adopt... and keeps adding them. SElinux, Xen, etc.

Is Fedora Core for everyone? No. No distro is for everyone... but I hope everyone can agree that they are happy Fedora Core is helping to advance the technology and indirectly improving other distros.