Fedora Core 5 Review (linuxforums)

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hello Clement Lefebvre,


While on the lookout for good reviews on the latest release of Fedora
Core, I came across your excellent one
(http://www.linuxforums.org/reviews/fedora_core_5_review.html)  and I
would like to add some comments.


I like the way the review starts out with a look at the buzz around the
release and the community rather than just the software bits. Its quite
surprising that many reviews completely drop off that aspect of a open
source project. 

While Anaconda has gone through a major revamp in Fedora Core 5, we have
been receiving feedback on going the extra mile by improving the level
of polish and tackling better some of the minor issues. The ability to
test a keyboard layout seems to be one of them that you have highlighed
in the review. It doesnt seem to be a requested feature so far, so I
went ahead and filed a RFE (Request for Enhancement) against Anaconda.
Refer to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186408 for
more details. I would appreciate if you can add more details to it. We
have this feedback procedure on both the release notes and the release
itself documented in our release notes that you seem to be fond of
reading at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/#sn-
Feedback. 

You have remarked that you didnt like that the Firstboot program asked a
few questions on well... the first boot instead of Anaconda asking
everything upfront.  There is a reason behind that which might not be
immediately obvious. All the options asked in Anaconda are required
steps to complete the installation while the rest of the Firstboot ones
are optional (though highly recommended). This two step process helps
streamline the interface better while letting the user skip the optional
steps easily. 

While IRC is indeed a useful application combined with the Freenode
Fedora IRC channels such as #fedora, it is not in general a popular
means of communication for a typical desktop user. We probably need to
set aside our Linux-y view of things a bit on that.

What you consider a inconsistency on the menu is something that has been
decided after careful thought and the menus have even more streamlined
specifically in Fedora Core 5 by the Red Hat desktop team. In general
applications are named after the task they perform rather than the
application name itself with the exception of a few well known brands
like Firefox. This has been found to be beneficial in actual usability
tests where many of the candidates who found out the application quickly
cited Firefox as a familiar name associated with a Internet browser that
aided them in performing the task or browsing the web quickly.

The conclusion that ...

"I never paid too much attention to what was going on in Fedora. In
fact, the last release I tried was Fedora Core 1. So I didn't have much
expectations about "Bordeaux", even though I got more and more excited
over the release after I had talked to some people from the Fedora
community. I have to say though: this distribution impressed me in a way
that no other distribution did before. Some things should of course be
improved, such as the automatic hardware detection or, as mentioned
above, the menus. But apart from these little details I can confidently
say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution
available at the moment. Suse and Ubuntu are working on their next
release, for sure this Fedora release placed the bar higher than it has
ever been before. A giant step was made in making Linux ready for the
desktop and “Bordeaux” is proof of this."

is indeed great to hear but I would appreciate if you can let us know
which hardware you found was not detected or auto configured by default
on the system to see whether we can improve on that in our subsequents
releases of Fedora. 

Thank you for evaluating and providing detailed feedback in the form of
a seemingly popular review on Fedora Core 5.

Rahul