Fedora 13 sailing along

Due to the good comments about Fedora 13, I decided to try the Fedora 14 beta when it came out. I installed it and it has worked perfectly. No problems at all. For the first time suspend on that desktop works - and it didn't even work properly with the Windows XP that came with it. It's the first time dual monitors just worked, right out of the box. The first boot after installation, I magically had two monitors working without configuring anything. I used to avoid Fedora even after the release due to quality. This is so different.

As for Debian Squeeze, it's easy to roll your own live CD, so you can set it up however you want before putting it on USB.

Now that I have my video issues solved (open ati driver broken, proprietary fglrx working with ATI's "hotfix"), I could probably also move to Fedora 14. But Fedora's so bleeding-edge in terms of application packages that I'm really not missing much.

I'll do a test of F14 at some point, but my hope is that the problems with my video chip (ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD) and the open-source ati/radeon driver will be somehow resolved by the time F14 (and Ubuntu 11.04) are released.

The fact that I can type out my video chip's full name from memory shows how much I've been Googling to figure this out (and subsequently whining about it on my blog and any forum I happen to be on).

I am actually more interested in RHEL 6. The beta 2 respin has issues but it is very promising.

RHEL is very tempting. Fedora 13 actually broke my video in mid-release as the kernel went from 2.6.33 to 2.6.34. That sort of thing would never happen in RHEL. It probably wouldn't happen in Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware either, but that's another story for another rant. Despite all the repos out there, I get the feeling that it's hard to get lots of desktop apps in packages for RHEL. Fedora has a huge repo, and while I'm not sure exactly how many Fedora packages are built against RHEL, I suspect it's nowhere near all or even most of them.

But for a targeted task where all my applications are available, RHEL/CentOS removes a lot of upgrade-delivered pain.

Indeed, F13 was the first "Fedora" that worked out of the box on my desktop too. Probably because there are better video drivers now, I don't know. Shows Nouveau (nvidia-customer here) and Xorg has progressed. Also, booting from USB was a breeze. But I only used it for a few hours, I have to admit. Great progress though.

Will F14 Live support installing to a non-ext4 root filesystem, or is that strictly an install-only option?

To my knowledge, the live CD still requires installing to ext4.

@Steven_Rosenberg: There are third party repos for RHEL that would pretty much give you all the desktop apps you could ever want. The only issue is that RHEL sticks with the same libraries and tools throughout it's lifetime. You may not be able to keep up with the latest versions of desktop apps they way you could with Fedora.