The Fedora 15 announcement says
A list of the problems we already know about can be seen on the Common F15 bugs page,at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs. If you find a bug that's not found on that page, be sure it gets fixed before release by reporting your discovery at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ Thank you!
But there’s nothing on the Common F15 bugs page, and filing a bug for each of these vague comments is impossible. So here’s my brain dump. If I were a well-known reviewer, people passionate about the project would jump in and respond to these, file bugs for some of them, discuss workarounds, etc. Oh well.
Boot/device problems
Running livecd-iso-to-disk from the Fedora ISO on Kubuntu 10.10 seemed to work, but my PC gave me the SYSLINUX boot: prompt. It seems Ubuntu 10.10’s syslinux version 4.01 puts an ldlinux.sys on the USB that doesn’t find syslinux.cfg in a subdirectory. After I repeated syslinux command with latest 4.04, it booted up fine! (I filed Fedora bug 699554)
Brief flash of text console at one point.
Same Pulseaudio problem with audio devices as in Kubuntu: my built-in VIA 8237 audio and Audigy ZS card are both labeled “Internal Audio Analog Stereo”, no distinction.
Terminal
When I’m in the Terminal, its “icon” background in top menu bar looks like a rendering glitch and/or collection of subtle window system indicators (>_)
The terminal bell sound is wayy! TOO LOUD!!! It’s much louder than other sounds.
Why no sudo?
liveuser is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Sound Settings control panel
Terminal bell sound is wayy! TOO LOUD!!!
Changing Sound Settings > Sound Effects > Alert volume has no effect on terminal bell volume.
When I choose an alert sound, the first ~0.2s of it repeats endlessly, and Sound Settings locks up. I have to Force Quit
Sound Settings Output tab should have a [Test] button as KDE does.
UI Toolkit
In GEdit Open Files dialog, it’s wrong that symlinks don’t appear in italics.
In GEdit, how come Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+PgUp, Ctrl+` don’t switch between tabs?!
Rhythmbox music player
The first time I started it Rhythmbox warned “Cover art plug-in not found (roughly).
It would be so nice if live USBs came with a few sample songs and images!!
Window controls
Bottom bar
When I move the mouse to the lower right, a bar fades in with “Rhythmbox” in it.
If I right-click on this, there’s an Open command. But:
- If Rhythmbox is minimized, it doesn’t reappear.
- If Rhythmbox is under other windows, it doesn’t pop to the top.
- Basically this doesn’t do anything?
Moving windows
The blue shade for half-screen is nice, but if I move Firefox towards the edge it pops to fill the whole screen, and there’s no indication this is happening.
When a window is half-screen, there’s no indication this is the case, so it’s puzzling there’s no resize cursor on the visible edge. And there should be a resize cursor, why not let me resize a half-screen window to be 2/3 screen!
Activities
Activities menu item at top left
Click and hold and Right-click do nothing. This is unlike every other icon in the top menu bar!
Activities screen
Type “IRC”, nothing shows up! I need an IRC client! Maybe it’s Empathy.
Type “Chat”, Empathy appears. But there’s no description of it. The KDE Start menu has the name and a few words of description, and can search on both. That’s much better.
While Activities is up, Alt-Tab to return to a different window doesn’t work.
Can’t use tab or Ctrl-tab to switch between Windows and Applications view. Are these tabs? They seem to be, so I don’t like Windows and Applications buttons sitting on the desktop.
Activities > Applications list
- the font is too small
- the ‘A’ in application names like Add/looks bad, the first stroke is ragged
- arrow key doesn’t move around list
- No right-click menu on apps that appear in Applications.
Help
Help > Go > All Documents… where’s the Gnome Shell document?!
Ahh, it’s Desktop help.
The detailed text for Desktop help is… Desktop help. It should be “Guide to Gnome gesktop shell”.
To disable the bell sound you need to go to Settings -> Sounds and then not only turn down the volume but click on mute. That did the trick for me to get rid of the annoying bell.
The testing of the alerts works fine for me. I can’t confirm the lockup.
Also why would you want sudo? I think Fedora did a good job by leaving the root stuff to root.
Thanks for the tips. Fedora 15 wasn’t dramatically better at first glance and I couldn’t tell in an evening if it would consume less resources with my default apps, so in the end I didn’t install it (and didn’t follow up filing bugs for all this stuff). Instead I stuck with Kubuntu (the KDE “Plasma” desktop UI on Ubuntu). I took the upgrade to 11.04, for KDE this was a minor no-surprises upgrade.
If Live CDs/Live USBs want to actually convince users to make the sale, they should
* Automatically mount your hard drive partitions, detect which ones are Windows/other UNIX-like, and create symlinks to “Your old documents”, “Your old downloads”, etc.
* Have some sample images and audio (and incorporate the stuff from your current hard drive).
* Inspect the applications on your current hard drive and suggest which ones are present in the distribution, which have alternatives, etc.
Hmm, I should make a blog post or follow up to Trying different distributions.