I am starting to wonder if Fedora is really the distribution I feel like sticking with long-term. But, now that I have the WiFi driver figured out, I figure I might as well give it a little longer.
I’ve noticed a few things about Fedora, compared to my Ubuntu experience, both positive and negative. I will now introduce those in no particular order.
The package manager of Fedora is much much slower. It opens quickly, but searches applications slowly. Also, I find that it often sits and waits saying “waiting in queue” as other package commands finish in the background. The package manager is, however, much better at avoiding file-locking conflicts. In Ubuntu, if you did two package manager things at a time, one would work and the other would not. In Fedora, one o the managers will wait until the other is finished. This means you could install something through the package manager, and something else through the command line at the same time with no problems.
Fedora uses Rhythmbox as the default audio player. I installed Banshee, since I find it better for various reasons. Those differences are for a later post, but the main reason is that Banshee seems to manage device synchronization better. Fedora fails to properly recognize my Sansa Fuze as a MP3 player. It will not show up in Banshee or Rhythmbox.
Fedora did not come with any common decoders for audio. It would not even open a simple MP3 file until I installed these. Installing this did not take very much additional time, but still was inconvenient.
I did find out what was wrong with my WiFi driver, Fedora installed the wrong version on accident. Ubuntu does this as well, but I found Fedoras method of correction a little less self-explanatory.
Ubuntu definitely has better hardware management and detection. Hardware management in Fedora is mainly through CLI, whereas Ubuntu had an easy-to-use “Restricted Drivers” wizard for proprietary devices.
PlayOnLinux downloaded and installed fine as an RPM package file. After I tried installing two games, both failed to run, but I suspect I did something wrong, and am retrying these.
I may decide to try out Debian if Fedora doesn’t quite get up to my expectations. Gnome 3 will always keep me away from Ubuntu, unless the Ubuntu development team decides to do justice to their distribution and introduce Gnome3.
