Fedora 16 Review: A Big Change or A Little Editing? (With Screenshots)

Posted by Jonquil on Oct 7, 2011 1:17 PM EDT
xjonquilx | Mepis, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux, Oh My!; By Jonquil McDaniel
Mail this story
Print this story

Unwilling to wait for Fedora 16 final to come out, I went ahead and installed Fedora 16 beta. So much has been fixed in Fedora 16 that was wrong in Fedora 15 I can hardly see why this is called a beta. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that go awry with Fedora 16 that will hopefully be fixed by the time the final release comes out.

Unwilling to wait for Fedora 16 final to come out, I went ahead and installed Fedora 16 beta. So much has been fixed in Fedora 16 that was wrong in Fedora 15 I can hardly see why this is called a beta. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that go awry with Fedora 16 that will hopefully be fixed by the time the final release comes out.



Fully Integrated Chat?



One of the features reviewers have been raving about is Fedora 16?s fully integrated chat feature. I’m kind of wondering what went wrong with my installation, as the only fully integrated chat feature available is Google.











For everything else I still have to open up Empathy, which is now missing its dock in the bottom panel. So now I have to minimize it instead of closing it to the bottom panel.







No Searches for Me



There also seems to be a bug in search that causes the system to freeze when you try searching for something in the Activities menu. The only solution for this that I have found is to type very, very slowly. Even sometimes that doesn’t work. I tried to take a screenshot of this but it ummm… froze. Fortunately though scrolling through the applications menu has been fixed, so I can at least turn to this option for now until the search gets fixed.



New Login Screen



Fedora 16 beta has a fantastic new login screen that looks very smooth, professional, and up to date. Again, I would provide you with a screenshot but that’s kind of hard to do from the login screen. When I first logged in to Fedora 16 beta, I was met with an error message that forced me to re-login. I was worried this would be a constant loop but fortunately that was the last time I saw the error message.



Where are the Settings?



Nothing has been done to improve the Gnome settings situation as far as I can tell. Dconf-editor looks the same as does System Settings.











I know a lot of people have been concerned about the lack of options in what happens when you close the laptop lid. You will be pleased to know absolutely nothing has been done about this (in case you can’t tell, this is sarcasm).







Conclusion



It seems that the Gnome team has focused more on fixing old bugs and adding new half-hatched code in this release than they have focused on adding full blown new features or fixing new bugs. So don’t expect anything special about Gnome 3.2, or Fedora 16. In fact, I would recommend sticking with Fedora 15 for right now as the chat integration was much better in its “halfway there” state than it is in this “almost there” state.



A slight note I would like to make is that Virtualbox is currently not working in Fedora 16 due to missing dependencies. If anyone knows a solution to this like another repository I can add on please let me know.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Reviews; Groups: Fedora, GNOME

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.