FC5: first impressions
Rahul Sundaram
sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Fri Mar 24 22:30:18 UTC 2006
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 16:01 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
> Now that I past the installation of FC5, I can share some of
> my impressions. BTW, I've been running Red Hat since 4.0, so
> I'm a long time user of everything Red Hat.
>
> I'd like to start by saying that this is a nice step forward
> from FC4. There's a lot to be happy about: new versions, nicer
> eye-candy, much faster in places. Good job!
>
> I'd like to stress the "faster" part. This is a very important
> criteria for a good desktop experience, and I'm really glad
> we finally see some much needed improvements. It took _seconds_
> in FC4 to start a simple app like gedit, now it's around a second.
> Also, Firefox really shines, and for the first time it's actually
> a better browser than IE for reading LKML [0].
>
> I can go on and on about the number of improvements, but that
> would be boring, so I'll start with the complaints :). BTW, I
> run GNOME, and try to keep things as standard as possible.
>
> So here are my complaints, in order of importance:
>
> 0. Missing terminal on desktop menu... just kidding! :)
> You guys were right, I can live without it. Mea culpa.
Good to see the hundreds of mails on the thread we had earlier wasn't
entirely a waste. The release notes has information on bringing it back
if you need it btw (yum install nautilus-open-terminal).
>
> [seriously now]
>
> 1. Metacity's new window in the background
> I can not stress how big of a problem this is for me.
> I have used it since it was introduced, in the hope that
> I'll get used to it. I didn't. Not only it does the wrong
> thing for me in 90% of the cases, it also forces me to
> use the mouse a lot more, which is painful for me.
> A few google searches and browsing through GConf did not
> reveal a way of disabling it.
We have a bug report open it. Upstream has tentatively agreed to make it
a option disabled by default
>
> 2. Evolution can't print
> Nowadays I get quite a few invoices via email, and not being
> able to print them is a big problem. Evo will just print the
> headers, but not the content. Even the Print Preview shows
> just the headers with an empty content. What gives?!?
> BTW, same behavior was present in FC4, I was hoping FC5 will
> fix it.
>
Do you have a bug report open on this?
> 3. Gedit's tab
> Not only I find these tabs simply the wrong interface, but
> unconditionally having one even if I have only on file
> open is irritating me to the point that I avoid that app
> even when I need it. It's ugly, it takes vertical space, etc.
> Again, I found no way of disabling this silly behavior.
Might request a option to turn this off in bugzilla.gnome.org or post to
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/index.html
>
> These are my top 3 problems. There are others, but they pale in
> comparison. If I missed a simple way of fixing them, I'd appreciate
> any pointers.
>
> Thanks for an otherwise fantastic distro guys! All the pain, blood,
> and tears that you guys put into it is very much appreciated.
>
> --
> Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
> Lattica, Inc.
>
> [0] Go to the LKML archive, say here
> http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0603.1/author.html
> scroll to the middle of the list, click on a message, and then
> click the Back button to go back to the list.
> See how fast it renders the list again.
> Until now, IE was way faster, but not anymore!
You are talking about Firefox 1.5's fast back feature that stores a
rendered copy of the history in it's cache. It might gobble up some RAM
if you browse a large number of sites with huge images in it but it's
good otherwise. Thanks for the feedback.
Rahul
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