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I’ve been a fan of Ubuntu for a very long time, but lately I had been questioning the direction they were heading in — especially regarding Unity. Unity is the latest desktop interface shipped with Ubuntu 11.04. It is based off Gnome 3, but has many differences.
I tried Unity for about two weeks, and then I tried Gnome 3 for two weeks — Gnome 3 beat Unity to the ground. My search of a distribution that supported Gnome 3 began, and yesterday I took the final steps towards this process.
Fedora 15: A trustworthy and well known distribution of Linux that supports Gnome 3. Over the next few weeks, I expect to make more posts relating to my change to this operating system. This article encapsulates my first impressions of Fedora 15, as I have been using it for two days now.
Installation Review:
The Fedora installer was fairly easy to use, and was very similar to the Ubuntu installer. Still, I found the Ubuntu installer to be slightly easier, and more aesthetically pleasing — however, aesthetics are nothing to consider in choosing an operating system.
Fedora gives the user many more choices for partitioning. These included: Use All Space, Replace Existing Linux Systems, Shrink Current System, Use Fee Space, or Create Custom Layout. For my system, I choose Custom Layout and erased my Ubuntu partitions, and created a new partition for root (/) and for my home directories (/home).
Side Note: Why create a home directory in a separate partition? Creating the home directory in a separate partition allows you to easily reinstall your system without loosing data, as well as switch to different Linux distributions with little chance of loosing data. The home folder contents stay untouched, it is quite nice.
Fedora also gives you the option to encrypt the partitions. I encrypted my home folder, but left the system drive unencrypted. I’m not paranoid, but I don’t like the idea of having people able to access my emails or bank information if my laptop got stolen.
Upon creating the boot-loader for my system, Fedora showed me my other partitions that had an operating system (in my case, a NTFS partition and a EXT4 Linux partition) and asked me which one I wanted to boot into by default. This is especially nice. The Grub loader in Ubuntu takes a bit of editing to change the order, but this was really easy.
Fedoras installation was incredibly fast. I was installing from a USB flash drive, which helped a lot with speed, but I attribute the fast time to the way the installation was actually done. Clever, Fedora team!
Post-Installation:
After rebooting, Fedora showed me my boot menu (I dual boot Linux and XP, but rarely use XP…). It auto-detected Windows just fine. I proceeded to select Fedora from the list.
Partially through the boot process, Fedora asks for your encryption password. After entering, it continues on.
Once the operating system loads, it brings you to a wizard for final “wrapping up” of the new installation. You create a root account, and your first user accounts, those types of things.
The boot time for Fedora 15 is about the same as Ubuntu 11.04.
In the OS:
Fedora 15 is very nice looking. Gnome 3 is great. I ran the updater and got the latest software and security updates. Fedora doesn’t bother you about restarting, which is nice.
Fedora 15 detected my Broadcom WiFi card, and found a driver that made it at least work. However, my connection drops without warning after transferring larger amounts of data. I am working on this slowly using support from the friendly Fedora community support people.
Fedora uses YUM and RPM’s for package management. I miss .deb files, but YUM and RPM files can be double-clicked to install.
Fedora didn’t come with LibreOffice or OpenOffice. This surprised me. I like LibreOffice, which took a little figuring out to install. It wasn’t anything that could not be done, thank goodness, but it was more than double-clicking. Flash, though in a double-clickable RPM/YUM file, took a little bit of work installing as well.
The software manager in Fedora is a little less self-explanatory, but still much better than command line.
Overall, I have high hopes for Fedora. I’ll be testing more later, and will keep posting progress.
More Related articles
- Gnome 3 or Unity. Which One Are You? (brighthub.com)
