I decided to install Linux on another one of my computers. I was seriously considering going with Novell's SUSE Linux, but I couldn't find a copy of it for sale in stores (CompUSA sold out of it, and didn't order more... even though they have dozens of copies of Linspire :p ). I figured that I'd give Fedora a try, since I've had the most experience with RedHat distributions (although this was my first Fedora install).
The system runs fine now, but I was frustrated by a lot of things.
The partitioning system of the install process (Disk Druid) seems bug free and pretty easy to use. However, it really annoyed me. I already had two primary partitions (suspend to disk partition and Win98 (for games) ). I wanted to put the whole linux install (root partition, swap partition, home partition) on one extended partition, while saving the slot (and enough free space) for a future OS (FreeBSD maybe). Disk Druid would not allow me to do this: it insisted on putting the root partition as a primary partition. I could go fix this later with GNU parted, but WTF?
Fedora Core 4 uses a graphical boot program called rhgb, instead of the console based boot sequence. It looks pretty, and would probably appeal to many people. However, it completely broke the virtual text consoles (you know, the ones accessed by CTRL-ALT F1,F2,F3,F4,F5, or F6). Even worse, it broke the shutdown and reboot sequences, causing the computer to lock up at the end of the sequences instead of powering up or rebooting. I was able to disable rhgb by taking "rhgb" out of the kernel arguments in /etc/grub.conf, but again, WTF?
After installation, I ran yum in update mode and found 640 MB of updates needed to be downloaded and installed. This took a long time, even with broadband.
I installed the auth package so I could run identd and access IRC, but the default arguments for it in xinetd.config were broken. It took about a half-an-hour of trial and error before I got it running.
Postfix wouldn't start up with the /etc/rc.d/init.d/postfix script. It starts up fine from the command line though.
The installs of Firefox and Mozilla are coded to use what looks like a GNOME-based interface for saving downloaded files. It's a little awkward to use, but I could get over that. However, if you create a new directory for the downloaded file using this interface, it forgets what the file name was.
Windowmaker won't compile on FC4. No RPMs were available for Koffice. Many source RPMS built for FC3 which don't exist in FC4 wouldn't compile.
Oh yeah... the GNOME desktop uses spatial nautilus, and it's not clear how to switch the behavior away from spatial. I always found spatial file managers to be cumbersome and annoying, and with a linux system they seems almost unusable. Some people may like them, but it should be something that is easy to change. Pretty much enough to make me stick to KDE.
Overall, FC4 struck me as being very beta-ish and required a significant amount of work to get it running smoothly. It works fine after all that work (much of which I think would be beyond a raw newbie), so I think I'll keep it, but I think people should know what to expect.
