Rubenerd

Given I didn't have any exams today, I took a break from studying for a couple of hours and installed the final release of Fedora 12 that was released yesterday. So far so good, I torrented the i386 DVD image and installed it on my ThinkPad with no problems at all.

Fedora's default Gnome desktop has been tweaked a bit since version 11 and while I still had to rearrange it a bit to get it the way I use it on other systems, it's very usable. I've found that with much of the Fedora experience; its configured in a different way to what I'd like, has some software I don't want and some software missing, but they're all easy to fix and when I do, it works great.

As I discussed last week Fedora comes with Mono which is kinda creepy (to use technical McGee NCIS jargon) which I hastily uninstalled, but I'm really pleased to see Gnote is now included by default instead of Tomboy. Red Hat and the Fedora team should be applauded for this move, and other Linux distributions and BSDs should follow suit. The official Gnome project team should also take notice that a major distribution has ignored an official package and replaced it with a less encumbered, faster, lighter, equally capable alternative.

Seal of The Approval

Of all the commercially backed Linux distributions, I think Fedora is by far the most polished and usable. If given the choice I'd still prefer to run FreeBSD because I've been spoilt by jails, security levels, ZFS, rc.conf, make world and The Handbook, and I still have a little desktop in Singapore running Slack, but Fedora will probably be the one I use when I have to use Linux, or on notebook hardware that FreeBSD traditionally has more trouble with.

Now I just have to learn not to accidentally try and run portsnap ;).