Fedora 13 (Goddard) has been released | Hacker News Reader

Fedora 13 (Goddard) has been released

fedoraproject.org

47 pointsmapleoin14 comments

I just bought a Lenovo T510 with an Nvidia video card. I installed F13-beta on it a couple of weeks ago. It was magical.

- Video card works out of the box using the nouveau driver. I just yum install'ed mesa-dri-drivers-experimental to get 3D desktop. All free software, no proprietary drivers. - SUSPEND WORKS OOTB! - Skype video and audio work flawlessly (installation still a pain on x64, though. But that's skype's fault). - Webcam works out of the box. - Flash works in chrome without issue (installation not automatic, but this is fedora)

The auto installation of print drivers failed for me, but at least the framework is in place to improve this in the future. I imagine it will get fixed soon.

Yes, you can make jokes about a linux fanboy being impressed with things that Mac/Windows have had working for years. But Fedora (and Ubuntu) are making demonstrable, regular improvements. The desktop experience has dramatically improved in just a couple of years. What will things look like in another two years?

On the other hand... I installed fedora on my laptop (from ~2006). It went flawlessly.

I went to install windows7 on it. Oh, wait. There are no drivers available. Stuck with no touchpad scrolling, the incorrect resolution, no hotkeys... Google around, some users of similar models report that the vista ones work, if you install them in the right order, manually downloading each from the vendor's site one at a time with fancy file names like SODAL-BLAH-nnnn.exe.

Lately it is really easier for me to install Fedora or Ubuntu than Windows. I'm not sure its because Linux got easier, either...

I use both systems(Linux at home for work/personal, Win7 at work for day job) so I don't consider myself a fanboy.

Just wanted to add that Windows didn't have these things working for years. They were awful before and can still give you a headache if you try to do anything that isn't "supported" by Microsoft. Only after MS had the manufacturers develop drivers specifically for its platform did these things get easier.

I reference my current install of Win7 at work which took like 4 hours due to drivers' issues(and its a Dell machine). Also, my Win7 system needs a restart every few days or it slows down to a crawl.

I'm picking on Win7 because the ones before it were much much worse and this one actually somewhat works.

Can't speak for the Mac.

I find myself frustrated by Ubuntu's packaging system. I really like Arch Linux, because I can do pacman -S ruby, and I have everything I need. Including a working Ruby Gems that I can use to update itself. And a copy of the latest Ruby 1.9, without having to change symlinks, etc.

I find myself hating the fact that I have to configure everything manually though, I don't mind using Gnome, or KDE, I just really like pacman. Configuring fonts it's just not my idea of fun. Is there any chance that I would be more satisfied with Fedora's packaging? I'm going to throw it in a virtualbox to check it out, just wondering if anyone has had a similar experience?

Yum is pretty nice. You'd probably enjoy it.

    yum install ruby

gives you everything you need.

Unless you need a gem that needs the ruby header files. Then you have to remember to always install -dev for everything, mysql, postgres, libxml, etc...

True. I never found that to be much of a hassle myself though.

First thing that stood out to me: they still need better fonts. That Wikipedia screenshot makes me cringe.

Any videos of the Gnome Shell? Their vimeo link had 0 videos uploaded.

It's quite sad that this promo page doesn't mention KDE (spin, SIG, anything) even at least once.

I'm guessing that's because there's nothing new in KDE so that it can be considered a feature. They don't mention gnome either, even if it's the default and preferred DE. They mention Gnome Shell which is something quite different and new that deserves/attracts attention.

Some preview of gnome-shell was already present in F12. And sugar spin isn't new either. Well, it doesn't really matter, but still, I'd like to see some more attention paid to present Fedora as "KDE distro" too.

Yeah, gnome-shell was/is present in F12 the same as python 3 for example, but they weren't considered ready to "push to the front" and be advertised as features.

F13 is running KDE 4.4, which I've heard is actually a significant improvement. Not as big of a deal as 4.2 -> 4.3, but still worth noting.

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