Fedora 19 – Schrödinger’s Cat – preview

I take offense at this author's contention that MATE and XFCE are somehow second class Desktop Environments in Fedora 19 because they "look old". Gee, I'm sorry that both MATE and XFCE eschew over-sized cell phone icons and non-intuitive functionality due to wasteful transitions, overviews and other nonsense for the sake of smaller resource footprint, familiarity to long-time computer users and in fact, actual productivity. Also the comment about KDE somehow being defective because its developers refused to incorporate some of ROSA lab's proprietary changes seems bizarre. Again, the author gives the impression that KDE's more traditional desktop paradigm is somehow lacking because its taskbar doesn't resemble OS-X's dock or its menu launcher doesn't resemble Unity's lens. Upon reading this article one would be forgiven for thinking this author wouldn't be happy if he were hung with a new rope.

I'm running Fedora 19 Xfce spin with compiz. It's light, nimble and quite sensible.

It's got that common sense familiarity and intuitiveness going for it.

--Dietrich

This reminds me of the young folks who write music reviews dismissing anything released before they became wise, all knowing 13 year olds.

> This reminds me of the young folks who write music reviews dismissing anything released before they became wise, all knowing 13 year olds.

To be fair, it also exhibits itself in reverse. What's that Homer Simpson quote? Ah, Google to the rescue: "Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact. "

Fedora 18 and Xfce 4.10 have been playing very nicely together.

Quoting:I'm running Fedora 19 Xfce spin with compiz.

Compiz, that cutting-edge technology?

Quoting:The latest stable release of Compiz is 0.8.8. A C++ rewrite has been announced on 24th December 2009 and is now released as a beta version (0.9.5.x).

Well, I guess XFCE4's native compositing is so "old school". Kinda like Debian's "speed bump", right?

2 points:

1) Just because something is old doesn't make it wrong.

2) Running Mint/MATE here for a good while both at work and home and I love it. But then I loved Gnome 2. It's not perfect, but it works fine for me.

I just don't get this idea that anything that doesn't change is necessarily bad. Progress is good unless it is change for change's sake.

Quoting:I just don't get this idea that anything that doesn't change is necessarily bad. Progress is good unless it is change for change's sake.

To put my comment into context, I wasn't saying compiz is bad because it's old. I was attempting to point out Dietrich's hypocrisy in saying that Debian's packages are too old, and at the same time using compiz on his beloved Fedora19. That's all.

Yes, change only for the sake of change is counterproductive.

"Old is good."

"New is better."

Both are fallacies.

@djohnson: I wasn't responding to your comment, just commenting in general. :D

Quoting:Just so we know that I do use the Album tag properly, this recording is defined as an album on the artist's website at: [url=http://www.glenngould.com/us/music

]http://www.glenngould.com/us/music[/quote][/url] He also praises Red Hat which uses old packages, just like Debian. Some consistent reasoning would be nice.

I actually appreciate the "old" packages from Red Hat and Debian and SUSE Linux Enterprise. All three strive for stability and reliability rather than living on the cutting edge. That is precisely what businesses, government and non-profits want. To succeed in the enterprise you can't possibly be living on the edge.

It's important to recognize that different distributions have different purposes. In writing a review I try to judge how a distribution meets its stated goals. I think the major enterprise distros (including the Red Hat clones) do that very well indeed. If the goals aren't in line with what you are looking for in a distro then choose one that is designed to meet your needs. Don't throw stones at ones that are designed with entirely different needs in mind.