Fedora 8 mini-review

For years now, I've downloaded Fedora Core and then Fedora from the very first version to now. I've always been excited by the technologies included (such as LVM and SELinux) and the presentation is always nice but I've also been let down after a few days by the user experience. There always seems to be something that prevents it from being my OS of choice.

The problems start as soon as you try to plug in or make work peripherals such as webcams, printers, sound cards, etc. Obviously, this is due to hardware manufacturer not being very cooperative with OpenSource development. How I wish the certified hardware program that was quickly abandoned would list instead of "barely" compatible stuff really 100% no workarounds full-functionality hardware to make purchasing easier. Linux HCL have always been complete jokes that will throw any hardware in there as "compatible" as soon as they can get a subset of functionalities working most of the time (with maybe a workaround or a re-compile of something...).

As for bugs, they are numerous as usual as soon as you scratch the surface and try to "do stuff" as a user with the OS. Connecting my Canon 850IS to retrieve my pictures? Broken. Trying to get my Logitech Fusion webcam working? Compile alpha-quality uvcvideo driver and hope that it doesn't freeze up. Sound? Not for you when kudzu crashes at startup. Try to play flash video with sound? The npviewer Firefox wrapper crashes when the sound isn't configured.

At some point, I'm also wary of reporting bugs since stuff like gdm crashing after a few CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE that I reported 32 months ago never got fixed. Or small enhancements requests for having the network proxy setting configuration actually do something system-wide. Or being able to click ftp:// url from the terminal. Or actually having Fedora follow its naming convention.

I'm using the i686 developer spins and met a bug where Eclipse help just doesn't work while verifying that a previous bug was fixed. You would think that someone somewhere would be testing for regressions, but you would be wrong!

More hairy things, such as coming back from hibernate, still don't work correctly (I lose network access and have to reboot). I have a long history trying to get this to work (a bug here and a bug there) but Fedora still hasn't got it right.

This is all within 24 hours of installing it and trying to use it... Which is quite scary: how many bugs are there once I get past those in the basic stuff?

All in all, Fedora 8 is better than all the previous Fedora 7 but it still feels like a beta in a long list of alphas instead of an operating system that is catching up to other competitors. The problem is both because the core of the system is buggy and because it has an hard time working with peripherals. Which is very frustrating because some things (such as having a central repository to install software) are a lot easier than in other OS!

Now, of course, I could spend untold hours trying to fix all these myself but for now, my free time is limited to testing each new release and keeping the hope that one day Fedora can fully replace other OS (which I would have thought would have happened years ago). In the meantime, testing it is a neat hobby...