Fedora Core 6, First Impressions
Hey hey!
The very first thing I did this morning was to burn the DVD copy of FC6 that I downloaded overnight and install it to a spare partition on my machine here at home. The install doesn’t take very long, I chose to do a default desktop install and let it go…
Visually, Fedora is the best looking distro I’ve used. They’ve updated the graphics and theme (as they do with every release). The logo is just sexy, it’s darker than Core 5 and IMO looks a LOT better. I couldn’t stand the light blue bubbly look of 5. The boot splash, login theme and default desktop all flow and have a common look. I’ll be keeping the desktop background for a while, it has an under water feel to it and I’m digging on it. 
Boot times are similar to FC5, to me it’s just fast. I’ve heard people call Fedora bloated, I’m just not understanding why. It doesn’t load a lot of services that I don’t need and feels fast to me.
The software selection is minimal in a default install, and I like that. You end up with a Gnome desktop, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Evolution, Rythymbox and a few other apps. All in all, a decent place to start.
Firefox is at version 1.5.0.7 and Gnome is at 2.16. I’m not surprised that FF isn’t up to version 2 yet, FF2 just went gold this week. I’m a little surprised that Gnome isn’t up to 2.18 though. I didn’t follow the development of this release so I’m not sure what the reasoning was. I’ll just take a guess and say that by the time 2.18 was released they had already put too much effort into development to just up and change to the latest version. Gaim and OpenOffice are the latest releases, Gaim is the latest v2 beta and OO.o is v2.04.
*** Edit ***
I was wrong, Gnome 2.16 is the latest stable release. My mistake.
** End Edit ***
Out of the box there are some 10 updates that need to be applied. Pup lets you know and performs the update with about 3 mouse clicks and one password prompt. It’s a nice simple way to keep your machine up to date. Who doesn’t like that??
My first impressions are good. My only complaint about Fedora comes from the fact that I’m a newb and I’ve been using Ubuntu. The package selection isn’t weak, but it doesn’t even compete with Ubuntu’s.
So now I’m off to play, I need to install some of my applications. Add some repos and get to playing. This is actually the first time I’ve had to configure a Fedora release without the assistance of fedorafaq.org. Should be interesting 
** Edit **
I’ve spent a couple of hours playing with FC6 now. I’ve got AIGLX/Compiz running (oh and doing that was just a few mouse clicks, System > Preferences > Desktop Effects) on my Intel card, using the i810 driver. I’ve got most of the software I like to use (mplayer, amarok etc) running, and running well. The only issue I’ve had is there are times when I open an instance of gnome-terminal, all of my existing terminal windows close (ack, now that is annoying). This only happens when I have the desktop effects enabled. I’ll look into that when I have time.
If you want to check out Linux eye candy and have a helluva good distro running, take some time to install FC6 and give it a shot!
November 1st, 2006 at 9:16 am
[...] Sooo, I went to work early this morning (all excited) to install the latest Fedora on my machine. I did the base install for a workstation, installed the apps I use the most and then turned on the nifty desktop effects. It was far less impressive than it was last week (see FC6 First Impressions). After using Beryl on my Ubuntu machine, Compiz is just kinda lame. You get a subset of what is available in Beryl and Fedora didn’t include any way to manage Compiz themes (at least none that I could find). [...]