Sunday 31 October 2010

I've been trying Fedora 13 Gnome on the main 'puter'.

Installed it yesterday, updated, installed various updates, codecs, DigiKam, VLC etc. I like the desktop icons better than KDE's, but screen fonts are less crisp and there's noticeably less control through the GUI (unless I've not found the right apps yet). The jury is out on whether it'll stick around, but they're releasing Fedora 14 on Tuesday next week with a KDE 4.5 option that might swing it.

The Fedora/Gnome mix has more of the clean of combining Opera and Windows XP classic desktop (i.e. NOT the toys R us icons that appear as standard) but lacks all the crispness of XP. That's compared to openSUSE 11.3 which has the slightly muddlier but softer firefox-style appearance. I like the Fedora look, but so far it's not crisp enough to make me want to keep it, and the lack of easy GUI control is disappointing. Getting the libdvdcss libraries to install was also quite a hassle, as Fedora is determinedly 'free' and eschews all non-public software.

Fedora also refused to open the folders containing my email and browser data because of permissions issues, so I've had to boot off my old Samsung HDD into SUSE (what I'm using now) to download my emails etc onto a memory stick for transfer to the new OS.

I think that if SUSE 11.3 had been completely stable and bug-free I'd have stuck with it, and I may yet go back to it. We'll have to see.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Play nice - I will delete anything I don't want associated with this blog and I will delete anonymous comments.