Pros: Extensive repository of prebuilt software, good hardware support.
Cons: Installation may intimidate nontechnical people, and may not
deal well with multiboot environments.
Fedora is the community-maintained Linux distribution that's the foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the leading commercial version of the open source OS. No surprise, then, that it has a tremendous following.
The biggest change for this release is the inclusion of KDE 4, the most recent edition of the desktop software that powers Fedora. (Ubuntu, on the other hand, uses the competing Gnome by default.) KDE 4 brings new icons and changes under the hood that should make Fedora run faster and use less memory than earlier versions.Now You can enjoy Mozilla Firefox 3 beta (considered better than firefox 2) included with more than 14000 new features ,it makes surfing really very fast.
But slowly, in the space of one weekend, I was able to re-establish some of the old behaviour and configurations, or find ways around the existing limitations. For Kate, my favourite graphical text editor, I was able to restore its old look through some of the available plugins. KMail, K3B, Kaffeine and Amarok all worked without any problems at all. Konsole was a bit more troublesome - it used to be able to remember the number of open tabs (and locations) from a previous session, but this behaviour seems to be no longer there. However, in terms of loss of features, the worst application by far has to be Konqueror. Once a highly customisable and even enjoyable file manager, Konqueror in KDE 4.0.3 is barely usable (you can't even copy or move files from the main window to the navigation panel, the one invoked with the F9 key?) and outrageously buggy. Dolphin is not much better either. Other annoyances include the Backspace key, which only works as expected half of the time in certain applications, pasting with the middle button, which is mostly a hit, but sometimes a miss, and the KDE spellchecking tool, which works in some applications (e.g. KMail), but not in others (e.g. Kate).
While these little bugs can be very annoying at times, there is one thing that compensated for all the shortcomings of the new KDE: its speed. I don't know if I should attribute this remarkable achievement to Fedora 9 or to KDE 4 (or maybe even to GCC 4.3?), but the fact is that the KDE 4 desktop in Fedora 9 is just so much snappier and more responsive than the KDE 3 desktop in Fedora 8. This is also true of Firefox 3.0b5 where everything happens so much faster, something that is especially noticeable on AJAX-powered web sites. This is probably the major reason why I will stay with KDE 4 and Fedora 9 for the foreseeable future - it is just so much faster than anything I have used on this particular machine (except perhaps some of the run-from-memory mini-distributions, such as SliTaz GNU/Linux or AUSTRUMI)!
As for Fedora 9 itself, I can't say it was a completely smooth experience. The PHP package still ships without support for SQLite, the only distribution that purposely disables this standard and well-tested PHP feature (as with Fedora 8, I had to download the source RPM package for PHP 5.2.6, remove the offending "--without-sqlite" parameter from its "spec" file and rebuild the RPM in order to be able to view DistroWatch.com locally). Some applications, such as Liferea and gFTP failed to launch on my upgraded x86_64 box, although both worked fine on an i386 test machine (new installation). I worked around the Liferea problem by downloading a newer version of the application that I found on the Internet, and I resolved the gFTP issue by switching to FileZilla instead. Both Liferea and FileZilla have been running fine since then.
When comparing Fedora 8 with Fedora 9, the newer version seems more stable. On Fedora 8, I had many problems with some applications that crashed regularly (KTorrent was the most notorious one) and others that did not always work as expected (K3B would sometimes report that it couldn't find any CD/DVD burner) - no such problems on Fedora 9. The X window system of Fedora 8 crashed at least once a week, but this was probably due to the combination of the proprietary NVIDIA driver and Compiz, something that I have yet to enable on my new system. Generally, I've found that the initial release of Fedora 8 was somewhat shaky in terms of stability of applications, but it became progressively better after it started receiving regular updates. I expect the same will be true in Fedora 9.
So if you are Fedora KDE user and expect some sort of a recommendation whether to upgrade to Fedora 9 or stay with Fedora 8, I would (somewhat reluctantly) say "go for the upgrade". Expect some major functionality loss, however, especially if you do a lot of file management in Konqueror, and you'll also get fewer options for configuring some of the important areas of KDE, including the desktop itself and the KDE panel. What you do get in exchange is much increased speed, a potentially more functional desktop with sexy widgets, and a faster Firefox. Best of all, you'll become part of building and testing the next-generation KDE desktop. Much depends on your own personality, but if you are a computing enthusiast who enjoys testing new things as they evolve, then Fedora 9 with KDE 4 should be an interesting choice.
Check out my next blog installation of Fedora 9
