Thursday 20 May 2010

Why I'm Still On F12?

First, let me warn you that this is not an objective and exhaustive review of Fedora 13 but just a (hopefully) short list of things (both bad and good) I noticed while trying to use it and to add that most of the issues I'll talk about are bugs/odd features in upstream, so not Fedora's fault.

Evolution


I think it's fair to start with an app that I use most and that is most likely Evolution (especially its e-mail component). The UI is reworked and I'd say it both looks better and is more usable, it's almost pain to return to F12 Evolution's interface. On the flip side, IMAP backend has also been rewritten (or so I've heard) and it hits a dead end here and there and because of that, using Evolution isn't very smooth and joyful. So in short, with future releases there is high probability Evolution will be significantly better that what's in F12, but currently it's one of the pieces that blocks me from advancing to F13. Plus, I forgot to mention, Evolution lost the option to keep gpg passphrase stored during session.

Intel Video Driver


Well, this one's a little bit of pain. I've grown quite used to F12 which has been damn stable so fast, so X or even the whole notebook frozen was a big surprise. Seems the frozenness of whole system have been already fixed, but last time I were in updated F13 (about a week ago), I still managed somehow to endup with half-frozen X — I move with mouse, switch to tty, kill apps (without any graphical response though) or kill X completely. But only full reboot fixed it for good.

Nautilus


Another UI change. Generally it seems cleaner, but what irritates me is that I cannot keep the entry-like input for paths — I seem to be able to access it only via ctrl-l and after entering the path, it reverts back to the button mode. No good, no good.

Webkitgtk


This where the most goodness (from my point of view) went, albeit not exactly as I'd prefer it. Thanks to hard work the guys over at webkit and epiphany, epiphany now can store passwords, but as epiphany does not have sensible session saving (why the hell do I need to kill it to save session?) [and for some other reasons] I use midori, which however it does not seem to know how to save passwords (in web forms, not in web auth pop-ups). The rest of the goodness (I know about) is same for both browsers — html5 youtube flawless support (only fullscreen seems to be missing), html5 video tag finally has handler, sites (like anidb) which serve pages in compressed format are now supported and java applet (I've tried only the openjdk one) is almost working.

Gnome-keyring


In one word it behaves strange. Sometimes the keyring that should get unlocked at startups refuses to unlock, sometimes I get asked for new password for 'default' keyring, which however never gets created… This is incidentally also the last thing that shows when trying to start up gajim. The good thing is that thanks to this I started using emapthy with a chat theme from one of my favourite anime durarara >_<

Conclusion


Well, there are still some hick-ups that keep me from transferring from the probably best fedora release so far (F12) to F13 to feel the new awesomeness, and one thing to keep in my mind is: don't be lazy and finally fill the bugs you've encountered!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you want to always keep the entry-like input for paths, use this command:

gconftool-2 --type=Boolean --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry true

Nushio said...

I don't know how this happened exactly, but using preupgrade to upgrade f12-f13, I ended up with a Nautilus that only lets me type the directories, I can no longer switch to the other button-based navigation system.

(This is good)

You're right on the rest, though I don't use Evolution, and havent seen an Intel freezes (I'm on an Intel gfx card)

Unknown said...

You can enable the location bar always in gconf-editor:

/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry

Martin said...

Interesting that people comment on the least important hickup for me :D Anyway, I don't want the entry-like input in nautilus always on, but when I switch to it, I usually want to keep it on for more than typing new path and hitting enter… I don't like when apps guess what I want to do next…

Anonymous said...

epiphany not having sensible session saving is odd, i don't understand its developpers