Initial FC7t4 impressions

[Tom Horsley]

The good
--------

Hey! It recognized my DVD drive this time, I didn't have to
install from hard disk.


Even more amazing, I turn on desktop effects, and for the
first time ever, they have worked with every application I've
tried so far (previously about half the apps I'd start would
have their titlebar wind up underneath the panel, making them
hard to move :-).


Dependency checking on packages is indeed faster, I'd now call
it merely annoying rather than glacial :-).


Most amazing of all (knock on wood), so far xorg bugs 2859
and/or 8790 have not cropped up. No flickering on and off of
the display (even with GL stuff which had the habit of
triggering it previously). Needs to be up longer for me to be
confident of this one though.

The bad
-------

I'm running updates, it finally finished downloading, and the
first thing I see is a popup message that says:

Unable to verify exiv2-0.14-1.fc7.x86_64
Details: Not installing key

I click on apply updates again, and now I get a popup asking
if I should import the key (did not see that the first
time). Did it grab the $#@!  focus away from my emacs while I
was in the middle of typing something it interpreted as cancel
when I wasn't even looking at the screen? If you are gonna
have an app that runs forever like the updater does, the last
thing on earth it should ever do is grab focus. By the time it
wants input, people have forgotten it is even running.


The IMSmap screensaver (I downloaded all the screensavers from
extras to beat on the ATI driver) locks up the system for
several minutes. I can move the cursor, but nothing else
responds, not even Ctrl-Alt-F1. As I was reaching for the
reset button after trying lots of stuff, the Ctrl-Atl-F1
finally happened, so I went ahead and logged in and typed
"reboot" to get back here into FC6.


Will you for God's sake figure out what category the
"terminal" application belongs in and leave it there!  Every
single release I have to play "find the terminal" (better yet,
put it in the panel by default - that's the first thing I
always do :-). Did you pickup this habit from Microsoft, who
also moves the "console" entry around in every single Windows
release?

The ugly
--------

The 3 icons for office apps that show up in the gnome panel
(word processor, presentation, spreadsheet) are, without a
doubt, the ugliest icons I have ever seen. They are garish
colors that clash with everything else I see on the screen
when I first login, and they look like they are drunk and
about to fall over.