Whats really new ?

[Lasse Kim Christiansen]

Hi all,

I've anxiously been following the list for quite some time hoping that Fedora
Core would be the solution to most of my current issues with redhat 9.

I've been jumping from Redhat 6 to mandrake (because i use KDE) to Suse 8 and
now back to redhat 8 and redhat 9 (still using KDE). I still love redhat 9
because it actually made it possible for me to finally entirely remove my
windows XP install on my laptop. And for that reason alone i've eagerly awaited
Fedora Core. Btw i'm working on the system, not using tons of time to recompile
kernels or do development. 

But suddenly it dawned on me ? Is there any real news in Fedora Core ?

- Kernel update (well, we're kinda used to that)
- Updated packages (used to that too)
- Additional hardware support (normally always in any new release)

What are the real news ? Graphical boot is offcourse interesting (i love
eye-candy and it's important to me, i'll admit that). 

And yes i care about boot time since my laptops is moved around and is therefore
booted several times a day. Why are Fedora not using the newer initscripts that
can start services in parallel (hopefully making boots faster).

What about the interactivity patches ? have they been compiled into the new
kernel ? Would make life lots easier for desktop users.

Most people that i've talked to think that K3b is the ultimate CD burning app.
But for some reason it's not in Fedora ? Why not ?

Neither firestarter nor guarddog is included ? I would think that intergrating
some kind of personal firewalling thingy would be beneficial. The original tool
included within redhat-config-packages does not seem to do that much. And
monitoring like you can with watchdog would be great !

The new Suse includes configuration utilities for configuring DHCP Servers,
Syslog and TFTP Servers. Since one of the reason why i use redhat/fedora are the
config packages i would really love to see comparable GUI utilities from redhat.
For some reason the configurations utilities from redhat, at least to me, seems
like they are just better than whats included in the other distributions.

Gnome 2.4 in probably a big thing. But the file selector in KDE is one of the
reasons why i have never used Gnome for more than a few hours (although i like
the look-and-feel of gnome).

Ethereal is still at version 0.9.13 ? Why is that when there is a perfectly
working version 0.9.15 out ?

Was there not something about Fedora being a "bleeding-edge" distribution ?

One thing which i'm awaiting with much anticipation is the ability to use yum
and apt repositories. FINALLY .... that will make life several hundred times
easier combined with up2date for day2day updates.

Is this just a rant about how annoyed i am with the new release ! no it's not
(even though it might sound a bit like it at times). I will most definetely
download and use fedora core when it gets generally available.

I just think that fedora could do better ! yum, apt, new gnome, graphical boot
and changed bluecurve will all be great but lots of things that could have made
it the ultimate desktop/mini-server bleeding-edge distribution are still missing.

And i won't even start on multimedia :-)


Regards

Lasse


PS: Now that i've complained i've gotta do my part. Downloading as we speak to
help with as much bug hunting (probably the only thing i can help with) before
the final release :-)