I have had a sorted history with Fedora. I first started my Linux in the days before the Fedora Project and before the Red Hat enterprise change. I am not sure of the details, but somewhere along the line, the Development of Red Hat become more commercial minded and the Fedora Project was created to fill in the gap. I am not an expert on the licensing and development policies of Red Hat but I remember the first Fedora releases. This was in the days before automated packaging systems like apt-get, yum, or pacman had become commen place, and I spent my time in “Dependency Hell.”

I have not been a fan of RPM based distributions for sometime, and my initial experiences before the adaption of automated package systems may have something to do with that. I quickly found Debian and the wonders of apt-get and have been mainly a Debian man ever since. All though the Arch Linux and Frugalware package manager pacman has impressed me over the last couple of years. With that said, I check in on the Fedora Project from time to time and have found many of their early innovations, which few distros where implementing at the time, have become major features in other distributions over time. I have admired them for their ability to push the envelop on occasion but have always found the distribution lacking in some way.

My experience started over Thanksgiving brake. I was having some issues on my laptop connecting the to my Parent’s wifi setup. I had Fedora 12 XFCE Re-Spin loaded on a USB stick and was experimenting with it before I had left. I installed it on my old Dell Inspiron 600m and the wireless worked out of the box. This did not surprise me since it is an old wifi card that has well documented support in Linux. I was satisfied that I could surf and watch movies on my laptop and started pocking around Fedora some more. The installation itself was straightforward. I have always appreciated the simplicity of the Anaconda installer. Some people have complained that it is not clear when coming to partitioning, but I understand partition tables well and found it easy to work with. On my laptop everything was preconfigured and I only had to figure out how to play movie and mp3 and watch DVD’s. I was impressed enough with it on my laptop I installed it on my Desktop which I built myself which took a little more configuration.The only installation option I have not seen, and I simply may not be aware of it is a core, striped down, command line only install like Debian. I like to have a bare bones system and build up from their with my own specifications and configure as I go to give me more control over my system.

The biggest complaint I have had since the beginning of the Fedora Project is the RPM based package management always felt sluggish and clumsy to me. Taking much longer then I had become accustom to with apt-get. The other problem I found, was their dependency requirements seemed to be overkill, installing up to twice as many dependencies for the same package I would install in Debian or Ubuntu. The one annoyance I found with it was the package management GUI lacked any kind of progress indication other then simply telling you it was downloading or installing. I think this is odd, since almost all package management GUI’s have a percentage or time indicate on what the system is doing. I hope that future releases of Fedora will correct this over sight.

One of the other things that has always been a point of frustration is their policy about some proprietary drivers and codecs. I understand the philosophy behind this, and respect it. However, as a desktop user there are some codecs I just find I want (such as to watch movies, DVDs, and play mp3s). Debian is also known for its strict open policy, but in some ways Fedora has them beat. I had to install EasyTAG to edit mp3 tags from their unstable branch because mp3 support was not included. Before in my Fedora experiences it had been frustrating finding documentation and third party repositories for these codecs and drivers. Fortunately I found most of what I needed at the RPMfusion website. I found that libdvdcss was no longer supported by RPMfusion and I had to find another source, and I had to install my nVidia drivers manually for my desktop (all of which is documented on this site). Anotehr issue I have found is support for wma files, and converting them to mp3 is limited, and have yet to solve this problem. One feature I would like to see would be an automated search and download system like Ubuntu has when trying to play files not supported by the default installation.

I was impressed with the XFCE re-spin and the detail taken to make it usable and accessible. I like XFCE for its lightweight design but still being a robust Desktop Environment option, and even run it with Compiz. The bug reporting tool was handy to, telling me about minor kenral crashes and giving me some detail about Firefox crashes and other things. The Firewall GUI is relatively straight forward, though I felt it was a little too straight forward at times. Overall the desktop experience on Fedoar 12 has been a stable and consistent experience. Last time I checked in with Fedora this was still the case with their Fedora 10 release. However, that has changed with Fedora 12, and I have been overall impressed with yum and the overall Fedora 12 experience.