Submitted by Phoronix
has published a brief preview of Fedora 9. Among the features being worked on are encrypted file-system support, updating KDE to 4.0, PackageKit integration, and switching to upstart initialization. In this article, we are taking a brief look at Fedora 9 Alpha and the features planned for Fedora 9.
Fedora 9 Alpha Preview
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I am skipping Fedora8 and waiting on Fedora9 from what I understand the odd numbers have more bugs worked out of them and the even’s are buggy.
I run Fedora7 and RHEL5.1 Server on my machines and at work I run Fedora8 however I hope Fedora9 is an improvement over 8. I do not really like 8 or the changes they made, I do like the ext4 file system and the encryption they are going to have standard.
Hats off to Red Hat, they have a lot of choices and that is what is all about in the end.
A (potentially) major blow to Fedora 9 is that it uses KDE by default. I say “potentially,” because since Fedora is primarily a Gnome-centric distro, most people in reality probably won’t even notice or care. I admit, I’ve been more fond of Xfce and even Gnome myself lately. However, I don’t mind KDE3.5x, but I tried a few “demo” live CDs of KDE4 and it was a joke. Lots of bugs, crashes, and barely any features at all. On the other hand, hopefully KDE4’s inclusion in Fedora 9 speeds up its development process. Who knows, maybe it’s already seriously improved since I last used it.
As for, IMO, awesome news–Fedora is trying to speed up the X server’s startup and exit speed. This is one thing that always annoyed me, X just seems slow, especially at starting up. Glad to see some work is being done to improve this situation, and hopefully other distros (maybe even the official X developers) pick up these improvements. When up and running, it still doesn’t feel as responsive as it could be… hopefully that eventually is addressed.
As for me, well, I’ll definitely try it out, but probably not until its official release. Its development live CDs seem to be so loaded with debug tools, they are slow as hell and often lock up on my computer with only 256 megs of RAM, and installing it with the classic install method is currently out of the question. I’m looking forward to its official release and first reviews.
Edited 2008-02-07 12:30 UTC
Now that would be a radical change. Where did you read that?
All i can see is that they plan to ship KDE-spins, but to my knowledge, Gnome is the default DE for Fedora 9, and i would be very surprised if that were to change in the next few years.
KDE 4.0.x will be the default KDE environment in the KDE spin but there is no change otherwise.
That wasn’t KDE4, it was probably just KDE 4.0.0.
KDE 4.0.0 was indeed buggy, but it is already out of date:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-announce&m=120224468023138&w=2
http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog4_0to4_0_1.php
The suggestion for the KDE4 series of releases is by all means try it out and report bugs, but be advised it isn’t anywhere near stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis as yet. Wait at least until KDE 4.1.0 is out.
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Feature_…
KDE 4.1 won’t be ready until May or June.
KOffice 2.0 should also be available by then, AFAIK.
I found KDE4 buggy, but we all know that was the case anyway. But if you look at its base libraries, its probably the first desktop environment that will give Apple a good run for their money in the near future