RR (20,2,2,2): Fedora 13
I recently downloaded Fedora 13, which was released about 6 days ago. Funny in that when I first tried to download it the mirror said I wasn't allowed to. (In other words, it was still a fresh release and not all the mirrors have been appropriately configured.) The first version of Fedora I tried was 9, but my experience with it was tainted by the graphics failure. How annoying. Anyway, Fedora 13 has few issues on this computer. So here goes.
To be more specific, I got the 64-bit version. This is actually mostly unimportant, I suppose. (One of the differences between 64-bit programs and 32-bit programs is that 64-bit programs tend to be slightly larger.) So anyway. I burned it on one of my DVDs (one that used to have Ubuntu 9.04), and yeah. This time I'm too lazy to get it on my thumbdrive. Which means that it'll be running entirely off the DVD, which is obviously slow. But who cares. Startup speed was decent for DVD boots, although nowhere near good enough, but that's excusable. Time for actual reviews to take place.
I didn't hear any startup sound. Maybe it's because I had my earphones plugged in, but I didn't hear anything. Not having a startup sound is actually a good idea. For years I've been annoyed by Ubuntu's startup sound, which has a tendency to surprise me when I forget to mute the computer before shutting down. (I later took the obvious option of just turning sounds off.) So this was nice. Fedora 13, like 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 have Transmission as the default BitTorrent client, which is quite decent. Ubuntu also has Transmission as the default BT client. Not much difference here.
Fedora 13 has pino as the microblogging client, compared to Ubuntu 10.04 having Gwibber. pino's user interface takes some time to get used to, but it's okay. It's not too bad, but I haven't tested it under high packet drop rates. (Gwibber doesn't handle thiswell at all; Twitter's web client didn't handle this until recently.)
The font. I don't know what's the name of the font Fedora uses. This shouldn't be a surprise, since the name of the default font is the default "Sans", which can (and do) refer to different typefaces on different systems. If I'm not wrong on Ubuntu "Sans" is aliased to DejaVu Sans, but for Fedora I'm not sure. Anyway, I don't really like the default font. I tried tweaking the hinting options, and I didn't quite like the look in any of the options. (And obviously I chose greyscale antialiasing. Can't stand inconsistently-coloured text.) So yeah. The DejaVu fonts were designed to look good on the screen, which might partially explain why other fonts don't look so good. The obvious reason, however, is that I'm used to the DejaVu fonts. After all, I've been seeing and using them for over two years already.
Sidetrack: I noted this stuff down while doing the test run of Fedora 13, which was some days back; I'm not currently using it.
Firefox 3.6 . Not really much else to expect, so yeah. The icons don't look so nice; more on this later. Firefox here seems like a default install with nothing special. Which is a good thing. I'm not complaining. Ubuntu tacks on some add-on that supposedly better integrates Firefox, but considering that I don't really care about that (I install my add-ons directly) I just disable it, which defeats the purpose.
Totem is still called "Movie Player" here. I guess the Totem developers really hate that name. Can't they just call it "Totem Movie Player"? Anyway, I got a video from YouTube (downloaded by manually searching for the URL, which isn't actually very tedious) to test it on. Quite expectedly, it didn't work. But it didn't say anything either. I was expecting some popup to tell me that I needed some codec. I tried to open an MP3 file I had (CC-licensed, mind you), and it didn't work. I tried opening an AAC file, and that didn't work. Along the way (not sure exactly when) I got a popup teling me a decoder is needed, but nothing happened after that. Let's compare the behaviour of Ubuntu and Fedora here. Ever since the first version of Ubuntu I used (7.04) when I was lacking a decoder it would open up a prompt to let me install one of the codec packs. And for some codecs it'll bullshit me about me using the software only for research purposes, about which I don't really care, so I just install. But it gave me that. Fedora just flat out stated "no decoder no video for you lols", which was actually less user friendly from a UX perspective.
Under Applications > Office there's this item called "Project Management", which is actually a program called Planner. That's a new one. I didn't bother fiddling with that too much, so I just closed it. There's actually nothing too interesting about that really; it's just a time management program.
Anyway, the icons. When I closed Planner there was this "save changes" dialog. The icons there (except the !⃤ icon) have an obvious common characteristic: they all had red (or some shade of orange) very prominently, but the prominence is because the rest of the icon is so dull. The "Cancel" icon is the same as the "stop" icon in Firefox, which presents a slight problem. At all times, within Firefox, all of the icons are mostly dull (in the sense of being perceptibly greyscale), except for two: "stop" and the Firefox icon itself. The latter is static, so it doesn't really affect anything. The former changes colour depending on state; in other words, during page load one icon is has red in it, but once page lead finishes (or is cancelled or whatever) that one icon loses its colour and becomes like the rest. That's actually quite annoying; you suddenly have the UI "light up" (so to speak) and then swiftly returning to normal. Either way, there's not enough colour variety. It's too dull. Most of the rest of the icons are the same as those in the default Gnome theme. The folder icons are quite nice though. Fedora 13 has specially designed icons for each of the default subfolders of the home folder, which are nice. (Ubuntu only has that for ~/Desktop.)
So that's about everything I noted during the short run of about an hour. Actually I don't know how long. But that's unimportant.
PS: "The playback of this movie requires a MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed."
Update: I forgot to mention something. Fedora 13 Live didn't have GCC. Which is quite serious, because it means I can't immediately write and compile a program that, say, rot13 encodes a file. Annoying, to say the least. It means that from a clean boot I can't do much, which sucks. It also didn't have wget, the practically universal downloader. It's almost as featureful as Windows.
To be more specific, I got the 64-bit version. This is actually mostly unimportant, I suppose. (One of the differences between 64-bit programs and 32-bit programs is that 64-bit programs tend to be slightly larger.) So anyway. I burned it on one of my DVDs (one that used to have Ubuntu 9.04), and yeah. This time I'm too lazy to get it on my thumbdrive. Which means that it'll be running entirely off the DVD, which is obviously slow. But who cares. Startup speed was decent for DVD boots, although nowhere near good enough, but that's excusable. Time for actual reviews to take place.
I didn't hear any startup sound. Maybe it's because I had my earphones plugged in, but I didn't hear anything. Not having a startup sound is actually a good idea. For years I've been annoyed by Ubuntu's startup sound, which has a tendency to surprise me when I forget to mute the computer before shutting down. (I later took the obvious option of just turning sounds off.) So this was nice. Fedora 13, like 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 have Transmission as the default BitTorrent client, which is quite decent. Ubuntu also has Transmission as the default BT client. Not much difference here.
Fedora 13 has pino as the microblogging client, compared to Ubuntu 10.04 having Gwibber. pino's user interface takes some time to get used to, but it's okay. It's not too bad, but I haven't tested it under high packet drop rates. (Gwibber doesn't handle this
The font. I don't know what's the name of the font Fedora uses. This shouldn't be a surprise, since the name of the default font is the default "Sans", which can (and do) refer to different typefaces on different systems. If I'm not wrong on Ubuntu "Sans" is aliased to DejaVu Sans, but for Fedora I'm not sure. Anyway, I don't really like the default font. I tried tweaking the hinting options, and I didn't quite like the look in any of the options. (And obviously I chose greyscale antialiasing. Can't stand inconsistently-coloured text.) So yeah. The DejaVu fonts were designed to look good on the screen, which might partially explain why other fonts don't look so good. The obvious reason, however, is that I'm used to the DejaVu fonts. After all, I've been seeing and using them for over two years already.
Sidetrack: I noted this stuff down while doing the test run of Fedora 13, which was some days back; I'm not currently using it.
Firefox 3.6 . Not really much else to expect, so yeah. The icons don't look so nice; more on this later. Firefox here seems like a default install with nothing special. Which is a good thing. I'm not complaining. Ubuntu tacks on some add-on that supposedly better integrates Firefox, but considering that I don't really care about that (I install my add-ons directly) I just disable it, which defeats the purpose.
Totem is still called "Movie Player" here. I guess the Totem developers really hate that name. Can't they just call it "Totem Movie Player"? Anyway, I got a video from YouTube (downloaded by manually searching for the URL, which isn't actually very tedious) to test it on. Quite expectedly, it didn't work. But it didn't say anything either. I was expecting some popup to tell me that I needed some codec. I tried to open an MP3 file I had (CC-licensed, mind you), and it didn't work. I tried opening an AAC file, and that didn't work. Along the way (not sure exactly when) I got a popup teling me a decoder is needed, but nothing happened after that. Let's compare the behaviour of Ubuntu and Fedora here. Ever since the first version of Ubuntu I used (7.04) when I was lacking a decoder it would open up a prompt to let me install one of the codec packs. And for some codecs it'll bullshit me about me using the software only for research purposes, about which I don't really care, so I just install. But it gave me that. Fedora just flat out stated "no decoder no video for you lols", which was actually less user friendly from a UX perspective.
Under Applications > Office there's this item called "Project Management", which is actually a program called Planner. That's a new one. I didn't bother fiddling with that too much, so I just closed it. There's actually nothing too interesting about that really; it's just a time management program.
Anyway, the icons. When I closed Planner there was this "save changes" dialog. The icons there (except the !⃤ icon) have an obvious common characteristic: they all had red (or some shade of orange) very prominently, but the prominence is because the rest of the icon is so dull. The "Cancel" icon is the same as the "stop" icon in Firefox, which presents a slight problem. At all times, within Firefox, all of the icons are mostly dull (in the sense of being perceptibly greyscale), except for two: "stop" and the Firefox icon itself. The latter is static, so it doesn't really affect anything. The former changes colour depending on state; in other words, during page load one icon is has red in it, but once page lead finishes (or is cancelled or whatever) that one icon loses its colour and becomes like the rest. That's actually quite annoying; you suddenly have the UI "light up" (so to speak) and then swiftly returning to normal. Either way, there's not enough colour variety. It's too dull. Most of the rest of the icons are the same as those in the default Gnome theme. The folder icons are quite nice though. Fedora 13 has specially designed icons for each of the default subfolders of the home folder, which are nice. (Ubuntu only has that for ~/Desktop.)
So that's about everything I noted during the short run of about an hour. Actually I don't know how long. But that's unimportant.
PS: "The playback of this movie requires a MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed."
Update: I forgot to mention something. Fedora 13 Live didn't have GCC. Which is quite serious, because it means I can't immediately write and compile a program that, say, rot13 encodes a file. Annoying, to say the least. It means that from a clean boot I can't do much, which sucks. It also didn't have wget, the practically universal downloader. It's almost as featureful as Windows.
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