Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews) [LWN.net]

OSNews reviews Fedora Core 1. "Fedora Core comes with Gnome 2.4.0 (plus some 2.4.0.1 updated packages), Mozilla 1.4.1, Gaim 0.71, OOo 1.1, XMMS 1.2.8, KOffice, Gimp 1.2.x, gThumb 2.0.2 (pretty outdated version), Epiphany 1.0.4 and many hundreds of other packages. The distro includes most of what users would need for their home usage: Internet applications, office apps, games, some multimedia support, easy administration for most things via Red Hat's preference panels." (Thanks to lon jones)

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Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 6:15 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

Early last week I upgraded my at-work/home workstations from RH/9 to FC/1. The installation was faultless.

Gaim: My RH/9 rpm (v0.72) stopped working because of the pspell problem; easily solved by doing a "forced" upgrade to the FC/1 rpm (v0.71)
Kernel: My current 2.4.22 "hand-rolled" worked fine, as did the "out-of-the-box" nptl version. "Hand-rolling" an nptl kernel, however, proved to be difficult, but not insurmountable.
VMware: Required vmware-any-any-update45, which generated the vmmon and vmnet modules.
Win4Lin: The kernel and mki-adapter patches from NeTraverse worked fine.
Up2date: Once I edited the URLs, it worked fine.

I don't use every single program included in the distribution; never have. And some I even <gasp!> compile from source. Where possible, I prefer to keep "system" programs as distribution-rpms, and "user" programs as source.

What has been most revealing to me is the Fedora-List mailing list. It is alive and full of Q&A material, as well as food-for-thought (re: the "Fedora as Production Server" thread). This high-volume/high-quality list, together with the freely-available Up2date repository for fixes and new packages, marks Fedora Core 1, for me, as a clear "winner".

I expect a brand-new, $20,000 automobile to work perfectly; they rarely do. I expect a commercial software package, like Win4Lin/5.0 ($99) to work perfectly; it does. My expectations of "perfection" with Fedora Core 1 were with regard to installation (in my case, upgrade) and compatibility with my 3rd-party software; it did, it is.

If the author of the review is disappointed with FC/1, he can, as we say, "eat across the street".

Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 9:59 UTC (Thu) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link]

Read it, Hated it.

To be short: avoid this review!

Sure Fedora has issues, but most issues mentioned in this review are because the reviewer is sitting between a newby and an expert, trying to compile from source, but not knowing to install -devel rpms, etc.

I have a question for the LWN editors, could you please not post links to such bad reviews, or at least clearly warn that they are bad?

You're talking in this LWN issue about trolls in comments, I concider this review a troll :)