Fedora Core 9: My Review

I've heard all the commotion about Fedora Core 9 since the final release came out.  Fedora has somewhat of a soft spot in my heart as it was the very first Linux distro I used when I switched from Windows to Linux.  At that time I think it was either Fedora Core 1 or 2, I don't remember exactly.  It was the fall of 2004, so if any of you can time line that, that's when I switched over.

I'm always into trying out new things with Linux, even if it means temporarily leaving Ubuntu.  I'm having some gripes with Linux lately, mostly dealing with hardware support and installation, so I'm looking for whatever works for me right now.  I have a TV Tuner card that works wonderfully in Windows, but no so great in Linux.  I heard that the 2.6.25 kernel would have major support for a lot of hardware, my tuner card included, so  I downloaded the Fedora DVD and attempted to install it.

I first tried to install it in VirtualBox.  The install process goes OK if you don't add any extra repositories to it, but I couldn't seem to get the Guest Additions installed for it, so I was never able to get my mouse pointer to "grab" in that environment.  I then decided to just wipe out the hard drive and do a normal install of Fedora (that's ok, I have backups made of Vista and Ubuntu so recovery is not a problem). 

After I installed Fedora Core 9 I was instantly transported into a foreign environment.  I had Gnome as the desktop environment, but the functions of the system were still a little different.  My biggest problem was that  I could not find the equivalent of synaptic in Fedora.  Sure, Fedora uses "yum", but that takes forever and a day and I needed to add the livna repository if I was going to make this system usable.  Usable meaning adding multimedia capabilities (mp3, DVD, etc..).  I searched over and over, but couldn't find it.  After searching for a bit through an ugly screen (because no nvidia drivers were installed yet) I reinstalled Ubuntu.

This really didn't come as too much a surprise to me.  I did a little googling before I installed Fedora and knew that proprietary software was limited for that distro.  Still, I knew others have done it, but I was unable to in my short time with Fedora.  So I gave up on Fedora and returned to what I know does work, Ubuntu.

After my experience with Fedora, it makes me wonder what those people on Digg were thinking when they said that the latest version of Fedora would give Ubuntu a "run for their money".  From what I experienced, Fedora still has a lot of catching up to do.