Some Thoughts on Fedora Core 5 Test 3

I just read this article about Fedora Core 5 and since I have installed it on my computer few days ago I think I’ll also put in my cents. Actually I have it updated to what’s on rawhide right now, so it’s probably pretty close to what the final version will be when it’s released on the 20th.

– I won’t bother to comment on the installer. The installer on most major distros, graphical or not, are mostly usable and I never had much trouble with them, with the exception of the old Debian installer. (Damn you, dselect.)

– It seems that it doesn’t like my 3com network card. After I’m done with installation and started poking around here and there, the whole system would freeze and requires a hard reset. I couldn’t pinpoint the problem at first but later I noticed it usually freezes up when I try to download something (eg update through yum) so I swapped out the 3com card for my old D-link/realtek card, and everything returns to normal.

– I have been having trouble with the recent 2.6.* kernels and my Belkin OmniView Pro KVM. On Debian Sarge and Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Flight 4s) whenever I switch back from another machine the mouse pointer would go nuts. Cursor jumps around and randomly clicking and selecting stuff whenever I move the mouse. It would not return to normal no matter what I do. (Well, restarting X everytime I make a switch isn’t an option.) The kernel that comes with Test 3 (2.6.15-1.2041_FC5) doesn’t have this problem. Unfortunately the new kernel on rawhide, 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5, brings it back. Although the problem isn’t as severe – the mouse would only go nuts for a few seconds then return to normal – still this isn’t acceptable because while it goes nuts it would click on things randomly and that can cause a lot of trouble. I ended up switching back to the .2041 kernel. I wonder if it was the Fedora developers that fixed this problem or the kernel developers, if it’s the latter, may be Ubuntu/Kubuntu Flight 5 would have this problem fixed.

– The author of the article, Bruce Byfield, suggests that GNOME is roughly twice as fast as old versions, but SELinux slows it down a bit. Personally I don’t see GNOME being twice as fast as the previous version (I have tried it on Ubuntu) and while turning off SELinux does make it feel a little faster, it is still not twice as fast. To be fair though, this version of GNOME has definitely improved over previous releases. Its speed and responsiveness are a step closer to KDE, who has made huge strides in that area.

– I’ve used OpenOffice on Windows. Version 1.x was slow and crappy that I didn’t bother. The recent release of 2.0 is quite an improvement that although the startup time is still a little slow, it’s pretty usable now. (The export to PDF feature is pretty handy.) Unfortunately I’m not sure if I can say the same on Linux. OO.o 2.0 on FC5 starts more slowly than its Windows counterpart, which is bad in itself. The biggest problem is its use of Java in the suite. Byfield’s article says that the basic document wizard runs so slowly that it makes you think the application has frozen. I thought he was exaggerating at first, but when I gave it a try I found that it’s no exaggeration. Not only the wizard is slow like molasses, it actually crashed the entire application when I tried to load a particular template. I don’t even know why the developers of OO.o decided to use Java in the suite. On Windows, the program itself is already a little sluggish, and adding some Java components makes it even worse. On Linux, which I’m sorry to say is even slower and less responsive than Windows, OO.o is simply unusable. Of course, I can avoid using some of the features that require Java, but then what’s the point of using OO.o to begin with?

Now, the Java package that is included in FC5 isn’t Sun’s Java. It’s actually from GCJ, a part of GCC. I’m not sure how much faster Sun’s Java VM is, but to make those OO.o features usable, it needs to be several times faster than GCJ.

– Byfield says Yum is a vast improvement over RPM. This is not accurate. RPM is a package format. It’s the same as Debian’s own .deb. The relationship between Yum and RPM is the same as apt-get and .deb. (Or, in Slackware’s case, Swaret and .tgz.) I’m kind of surprised the author would make this mistake.

– On the other hand, he’s right about the Yum Extender (Yumex) application. It is a much better package manager than Pirut and Pup. Although I’m comfortable with using the command line yum to update and install packages, Yumex is more convenient.

– Another program that he mentions, AlaCarte Menu Editor, is – I hate to say it – pretty crappy. I’m sorry, but how complex is a menu editor application that it has to be this slow? It takes a ridiculously long time for such a simple application to load, and when you click on an item, it takes a good couple of seconds to respond. Its unresponsiveness is almost on par with OO.o’s document wizard it’s not even funny. Seriously, how many years is it going to take for GNOME to have a decent menu editor? KDE has one for years, XFCE has one too, and they are nice and fast and get the job done. It’s only a menu editor, it’s not that hard to write one with C/C++ right? AlaCarte is written in Python, and it is pretty slow even for Python apps. (Redhat/Fedora has many GUI tools written in Python, and they are nowhere as slow.)

– FC5 includes a few Mono applications and I don’t find them to be particularly useful. F-spot and Tomboy aren’t as slow as Byfield says (how can they be slower than AlaCarte?), but there are alternatives that take much less resources (the precious RAM) to run. What drives me crazy is Beagle, which has a cron job scheduled by default that spends a good couple of hours every night trying to index my entire harddrive. I don’t use Beagle, I don’t have the daemon running, and I don’t want to have that crazy cron job running every night. (And I thought updatedb takes a long time to run…)

– While I mostly prefer KDE to GNOME, with FC5 I’m having a little tough time deciding which one to use. My dilemma:

• KDE and many of its applications are faster and more responsive than GNOME.
• I like Konqueror as a file manager much more than Nautilus. KIO Slaves makes Konqueror a very good file manager.
• I prefer Quanta Plus to Bluefish.
• KDE gives me more options to customize the environment to the way I like.
• KDE also seems to use slightly less resources than GNOME.
• GNOME’s default UI is more polished and easier on the eyes. The default color scheme isn’t as bright as in KDE which is a big plus to my eyes.
• GNOME and its applications seem to have better looking fonts. Even though both KDE and GNOME use the same set of fonts, for whatever reason the fonts look better in GNOME.
• Firefox starts faster in GNOME, because Firefox is a GTK+ app. (But Firefox is still dog slow on Linux.)
• KDE apps start a lot slower in GNOME, because it has to load all those KDE libraries first. It makes using Konqueror as a file manager in GNOME a bit inconvenient.
• GNOME doesn’t allow me to customize anything, which can be annoying. On the other hand, KDE sometimes gives me too many options that I can get lost in them.
• Some of the tools in GNOME are either very slow or not as useful as their KDE counterparts. Menu Editor anyone?
• Pet peeve: I simply don’t understand why GNOME cannot remember the position of icons on the desktop. Everytime I line them up when I logout then return, they will be at their old, unaligned position again. How hard is that to fix it? I’ve seen this problem in older versions too! Sheeesh.

I’ve been playing with both on FC5 and I’m leaning a bit toward GNOME. Unfortunately making sure my eyes feel comfortable is a high priority. At least I can still use KDE programs in GNOME, although I’ll have to put up with the sluggishness. I’m also thinking about trying Xfce. I use it on my laptop that runs Slackware and it’s nice and fast.

– Overall, I think FC5 is usable (at least as a development machine, which is how I plan to use it) but its sluggishness can get annoying at times. Most applications aren’t *THAT* bad, but out of all the unresponsive apps, OO.o is the worst. If anything an office suite is one of the last things that should be slow. I can see myself making sure my machine is fast enough to run an IDE such as Eclipse, but I certainly don’t think I need a top of the line computer to run a friggin’ word processor. On the other hand, FC5 itself, along with many of the applications, eats up a ton of RAM. Part of it is FC5’s fault, such as having too many services on by default, but mostly it has to do with the fact that a lot of apps are such memory hogs. GNOME itself uses a lot of resources. Firefox has always been one. And many of these Mono apps are not lean by any means. I think this shows the general trend that if one wants to run Linux (with a GUI and being able to do anything useful) he better make sure he has a fast machine with a ton of RAM. Personally, I don’t like this trend very much.

~ by haydeé on March 16, 2006.