Fedora 9 Beta review
In one sentence: so far so amazing! It’s now stable and completely usable. I now have a workable F9 system ( rawhide ) which I use daily. No more F8!!! Though we have yet ( one week ) to see the final artwork, but it’s still amazing. Some of the things I really like about F9 are:
-PackageKit: an amazing and fast front-end for yum. Specially mixed with yum 3.2.13, which has a policy that can be set to only download the best possible architecture for you beloved CPU 
what are those junk i386 packages when you can have the x86_64 ones? And I love the Package-Kit applet which shows up in the panel so you don’t have to worry about when something is finished or even worse, having some windows open while you don’t need them ( update windows ) It will notify you when the thing you’re doing is finished!
-Firefox 3: very natural look, I just love it. Bookmarking couldn’t get easier, especially for a bookmark-worm like me! And it’s faster, but the downfall is that it’s still Beta 5, not final!! but on the hand, it’s stable
-World Clock applet: Now I can easily have different time zones in my hand. It’s very handy when you want to call somewhere you have no idea what the time zone and you don’t have enough time ( lazyness? ) to look it up!
-New artwork ( seen this one but still out of rawhide ): Simply I like the Sulphur ( ph not f ) artwork, it looks nice
P.S. and I might not have cleared myself, but you have the choice of policies in yum whether you want the best possible architecture only to be installed or all of the architectures to be installed!
Dieter Spahn said,
March 29, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I really don’t know what’s so good on Fedora 9 Beta. In my opinion it’s still full of bugs, especially PackageKit. (Haven’t you seen all those PackageKit deamon backend errors?) Also, I’m not able to setup the German keyboard layout in this Beta.
I see no reason so far why I should change from F8, which works fantastic for me, to a (as always in the first 3 to 4 month) buggy F9.
Anyway … Good luck with F9
fengshaun said,
March 30, 2008 at 3:34 pm
yea, it is still buggy. And I also can’t get my nvidia driver working, but it’s a fun thing to play with, with various bugs. And reporting bugs in the Beta stage is important
will said,
March 30, 2008 at 10:16 pm
The reason you need to download some i386 packages on a x86_64 system is because you need them for compat.
In fact, there is no real reason to run x86_64 on a desktop/laptop at all unless you are taking advantage of the large memory enchancements (8gb+) or running Oracle Applications.
There is a small speed boost, but it will not be noticeable on current hardware (reminds me of the people raving about getting 60-100fps in games when the human eye can only register 30)
Many things simply do not work well currently on x86_64, like Flash (though that’s hardly the distributions fault).
fengshaun said,
March 30, 2008 at 10:24 pm
that’s right, but yum 3.2.13 will install i386 structure IF the x86_64 version is not available. And also, human eye can register motion as fast as a neuron can transmit data to brain, which is thousands of pulses in a second! or even way more than that. It’s real-time actually, so there is no limit for that!
for that matter, as I said, yum installs i386 or any available architecture if the best possible structure is not available.
You can, however, change this policy to ‘All’ or ‘Best’ depending on your likings but I prefer to have one architecture rather than having multiple architectures on one system
after all, it’s linux, so it’s adjustable!
TeapotPhilosopher said,
March 31, 2008 at 5:44 am
Actually, Will’s right about the fps thing. Wave your hand in front of your face quickly, and you do not see a crisp image of your hand. That’s because your eye does not register motion in real-time.
Anyway, as for Fedora 9, I’m glad they’ve adopted PackageKit. Any attempt to make Linux software installation easier is welcome. As for Firefox, I’ve recently tried it too and it seems fairly stable to me, and I’m actually quite surprised they keep delaying release candidates, though I’m sure they have some reason. I read somewhere that Fedora were considering shipping KDE 4 by default as it conforms to the idea of shipping the bleeding edge technology Linux has to offer. Did that happen?
Well, another couple of things that are worth mentioning are ext 4 support and encrypted file system support. Apparently, ext 4 is 15-20% faster which is awesome. Imagine that, and the ~40% speed improvement KDE 4 has to offer. Then add that to the security of an encrypted file system is nothing short of brilliance.
It’s a shame that a few issues such as marketing, binary support and OS installation continue to let Linux down.
fengshaun said,
March 31, 2008 at 9:08 pm
oh well, I didn’t know that. Thanks
that was one thing I learned today!
as for KDE 4, it is the default KDE in F9, and it’s stable and nice now. Unfortunately it’s still not the KDE 4 that everyone is waiting for, KDE 4.1 is!!
yea, it has a quite awesome speed and stability now. And it’s not surprising either, because it’s just one month to final release!
It is definitely a shame. Binary support is not a really big issue, just the marketing is the thing that lets linux down. If they would market for it better, especially for organizations and schools, I think it will get itself fitted better!!
TeapotPhilosopher said,
March 31, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Agreed. Though I do think the KDE 4.0 release was justified, because it’ll kick start the porting of KDE apps that aren’t part of the official tree.
Didn’t know it’s only a month to the final release. I guess we all learn something new everyday
It’ll be awesome, and I’ll get even more of my Windows using friends using open source software.
As for the binary support, I disagree. A widely adopted, standardized binary support system is required for any OS to be mainstream. I think the adoption of Mac and Ubuntu is already showing that, despite Ubuntu’s poor marketing. The fact that binaries often have to be released on a per-distribution basis is certainly a negative.
As for marketing Linux for organizations and schools, it’s actually happening. Let’s hope it kicks off. The fact that Linux is entering the “ultra-portable laptop” market at speed is awesome
The Asus EeePC is just the beginning! What I love is that Microsoft can’t compete in the market either because of their resource hungry OS. And with Mac being so expensive, Linux should really take the cake 
Fiar said,
May 20, 2008 at 10:45 pm
It’s out in final version now. It’s using KDE4, and I’m not at all encouraged by the new KDE at this point. It has a LONG way to go to even be half as good as KDE3. I would have preferred sticking with KDE3 until the next release. Firefox beta is taking some getting used to . My main issue is just that the themes and plugins aren’t compatible for many of them.