I have not used a Fedora distribution since Fedora 10 because I was dissatisfied with it (for some reason I can no longer recall) and switched to dpkg-based Ubuntu instead. Last week, I decided to check if Fedora 12 is any better. I was deeply disappointed due to several choices made by the Fedora developers and will be going back to Ubuntu soon. Here are some of the choices that I find disappointing:
- Fedora 12 (or maybe an earlier release) decided not to bundle OpenOffice.Org with the LiveCD. This means that if you install Fedora 12 from the LiveCD you do not get an “office ready” distribution like it used to be. Furthermore, OpenOffice.Org cannot be installed as a single package even afterwards. For example, I was hoping that the following command would install OpenOffice.Org: ‘yum install openoffice.org’. But this does not work. You either have to do: ‘yum install openoffice.org*’ (which installs all sorts of crap that most users do not need) or ‘yum -y install openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-base openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-draw openoffice.org-math’ (which is definitely not convenient for new users).
- The installation of ‘compiz’ with Fedora 12 is totally broken and a lot of the compiz plugins are not installed by default (i.e. they are part of an ‘extras’ package). The default installation does not work correctly if one attempts to configure compiz using ccsm. Any settings that are modified via ccsm do not affect the running compiz. One has to install several other packages for ccsm and compiz to communicate. And even then they do not communicate perfectly. For example, it took me several attempts to get the shortcut ‘Ctrl-Alt-t’ to open a gnome-terminal to work. I enabled this shortcut via ccsm but it had no affect. I had to enable it in Gnome settings for it to work at first. Later, I found that for it to work correctly, I had to run this yum command: ‘yum install -y ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf fusion-icon-gtk emerald compiz-fusion compiz-fusion-gnome libcompizconfig compiz-gnome compiz-bcop compiz compizconfig-python compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-extras-gnome’. Even after that I still could not get ‘focus follows mouse’ behavior using ccsm. I had to install another package, ‘control-centre-extra’, to enable this behavior. This is totally messed up.
- The new package manager interface is aweful under Fedora. It is very slow and the interface is confusing. For example, once when I searched for a package, it automatically started downloading a list of packages. It took it several minutes to download this list over a slow connection (tethering over my phone) when I just wanted to get a quick list of available package. This is unacceptable. Furthermore, here is another confusing aspect of this interface. When I search for a package, it lists all the packages that match the search. Some of these packages are displayed with a checkmark next to them which I assume means that they are installed. Other packages have an unchecked checkbox next to them which I assume means that checking them will flag them for installation. So far so good. However, as soon as I mark one of the (unchecked) packages for installation, the checkmarks next to the previously installed packages disappear. What does this mean? For me it is an alarming signal as this might indicate that the previously installed package might get uninstalled (since it is now unchecked) due to some conflicts with the new packages I have chosen to install. This is confusing to say the least and there is no tooltip or textual description of what is going on. This really sucks and a new user is bound to be really confused by this.