I gotta admit, I really am a Gnome-fanboy. KDE just isn't for me. I like the simplicity. I like the consistency. I like the new file-dialog, heck, I even like the spatial nautilus. Fedora has a link to a navigational nautilus, so some users won't even notice that the file-manager philosophy has changed. I see spatial browsing more as an additional capability. Sometimes it is really helpful. The trick - for me - is to put some shortcuts to the folders I use regularly on the desktop. Often, I really want to put a file from location A to location B. Works like a charm then...
The multimedia stuff is all good. XMMS is solid as ever, Rhythmbox plain rocks. I have all my (around) 130 CDs ripped to my computer. I did that in Windows sometime ago, because it was just easier. I simply can't use grip, this program always was a usability nightmare. Sound-Juicer, on the other hand, is exactly what I want, but it still misses the one and only important feature, i.e. setting quality. Please, include this as soon as possible. It's just not fair to have a brillant, nice-looking program that is - unusable. With this release, I switched from mplayer to totem. Gnome consistency issues (though i give kudos to the mplayer-team, they have a really nice program!). Totem is finally "there", plays back all my video files, VCDs, DVDs without an issue. Ok, I admit, I do possess exactly 1 (one) DVD, but that one worked :-)
I added bluefish for web development (again via freshrpms yum repository). I have yet to install java and flash. But I think I will abstain from flash. Nowadays, all I ever see are flash ads. I can't wait for mozilla to include the flash-blocker... On another note, my usb flash stick finally *just works*. I plugged it in and there was, after a short time, an additional entry in the "Computer" list. Installing my Printer (a Laserjet 1100) via a JetDirect printserver was as easy as ever.
Now that I have used Fedora for three days, I am really quite happy with it. The whole system feels snappy, all my regular programs work. The whole system feels a bit more refined again. The menu layout is way better than before. Openoffice has beautiful icons now and german is installed as the default language (very important, i constantly had gripes with the spell-checker in Fedora Core 1). Still, I have some issues with Fedora Core 2: the Gaim tray icon doesn't work for me, I have to investigate why. I encountered a pretty bad bug when I opened a pdf-file with gnome pdf that I had just created with Openoffice's pdf-export (see screenshot). Nautilus sometimes behaves weird when I try to open a folder with the pictureview-style. Some less annoying issues: Mozilla was originally english, even though I had selected "german" during installation. Not a real problem, at least Openoffice is now german out-of-the-iso. Rhythmbox no longer has a "quality"-column, but that's a temporary issue, it will probably be included again with the 1.0 series of Rhythmbox. Gnome still lacks a decent CD-burning application. K3B is a nice addition but I would prefer a Gnome-app (see Totem). The Red Hat configuration tools don't use the new file dialog, but that's probably (hopefully) solved in Fedora Core 3 (still, this is a consistency issue - did I mention that consistency is important for me?). On the whole, I gotta say that I follow the Gnome development very closely and I am more and more satisfied with Gnome. Red Hat 8 was pretty much unusable, Red Hat 9 just gave a glimpse of what Gnome could become someday. Still, Red Hat 9 was the system that finally made me switch from Windows to Linux as my day-to-day system. Fedora Core 1 was a refined Red Hat 9, Gnome 2.4 was once again a very nice improvement. Fedora Core 2 now features the new kernel, Gnome 2.6 and the whole package really starts to fly. Overall, I am pretty much impressed.
About the author:
Christian Paratschek is a 28 year old self-employed sysadmin, who has used Linux for about three years. He tries hard not to be a Red Hat zealot, as well as he tries hard not to be a Gnome zealot (and he fails consistently).
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
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