It’s hard to believe that Fedora is already at it’s thirteenth version. I remember years back using Redhat 10 during it’s beta phase, and then the initial confusion after the name was changed to “Fedora” for the first time, at the last second before release. Since then, there have been wonderful versions of Fedora, and even some horrible ones. Thankfully, lately it seems as though the distribution is maturing and the last version wasn’t half bad. Fedora 13 is decent too, though I don’t think I can necessarily recommend it over any other GNOME distribution.
As usual, I decided to test Fedora 13 on my Dell Latitude D630 laptop, which gets by with its 2ghz processor, and its decent 4GB of RAM and integrated Intel graphics. It’s not the most impressive system in the world, but it works, at least until I decomission it in a few months. Anyway, installation seems to be typical of Fedora, which is pretty easy to follow and isn’t confusing, at least to me. I still think Ubuntu and its derivatives have the best installer right now, but Fedora’s isn’t bad either.
As far as presentation goes, Fedora is a mixed bag. The splash screen displayed while booting up and even the log in theme have been polished and look really nice. The default wallpaper is even pleasing to the eye. What I don’t understand however, is Fedora’s choice to use the Clearlooks theme by default, which is a part of just about every GNOME distribution out there. The Clearlooks theme isn’t bad, but it’s been around for at least four years, and several Fedora releases have had custom themes, so I’m curious why this one doesn’t. In fact, that seems to be the typical nature of Fedora. Some releases have custom themes in place, and others don’t. While I don’t think that there is anything wrong with Fedora’s choice in theme this time around, but there isn’t any consistency between releases other than they typically prefer the color blue.
Don’t get me wrong, Fedora is by no means hard on the eyes. The Clearlooks theme gets the job done, but unfortunately they won’t win any design awards either, especially with all the work Ubuntu has put into their distribution during this same period, not to forget Linux Mint and others. However, to be fair I don’t think any version of Fedora has ever really had a design to rave about.
Presentation aside, the performance for me was just about what you would expect from a typical GNOME distribution. GNOME 2.x is an aging desktop environment, but it gets the job done, and on modern hardware it screams. I don’t have any complaints about responsiveness or speed here. Either I can credit the speed and response times to Fedora not bloating the system with needless processes running in the background, or just how fast GNOME is in general when compared to more beefy interfaces. Regardless, from what I can see the latest versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mint are all responsive and feel snappy.
When it comes to new features, I wasn’t able to find much. There has been a ton of work under the hood (I’ve read about the btrfs file system (which I don’t use), Nourveau for NVIDIA graphics cards (this laptop uses integrated graphics), work done on NFS (I use Samba) and some other features and tweaks scattered throughout. Overall, I’d say when it comes to new features, Fedora 13 is rather boring. That’s not a bad thing though, because at least some consistency is good and at the very leat you’re getting all the latest versions of all of your favorite applications, which in and of themselves bring interesting things to the table, especially KDE 4.4.
Conclusion
So, should you consider using Fedora? The way I see it, if you are already using Fedora 12 you shouldn’t have anything to lose and everything to gain. However, if you use a different Linux distribution already or you are new to Linux and looking for a place to start, Fedora may not be the right choice. For beginners, I believe that Ubuntu and especially Linux Mint hold the crown as the best noobie-friendly distros. For those that are already using Linux, Fedora doesn’t offer anything major you can’t get elsewhere. However, Fedora isn’t bad and a great deal of polish and fine tuning have went into this release (I believe it was delayed a few weeks to get the last few bugs ironed out).
If you do decide to use Fedora, be cautious if you are using proprietary graphics cards, and make sure that you test your system with the live CD first. I’ve heard of there being issues with proprietary graphics cards (NVIDIA and ATI) though I didn’t have such a system available to test.
The Good
- Responsive
- Clean layout, no clutter to be seen
- Latest and greatest open source applications
The Bad
- Uses Clearlooks despite having had custom themes before
- No real benefit for using Fedora over other distributions
- Possible issues with proprietary video cards
Overall: 4/5 (Good)
Jeremy is a Certified IT Technician that blogs at ITNewsToday.com in his spare time. He has over ten years of industry experience, and studies the IT industry every single day. Jeremy has become an open source enthusiast over time and is studying for his Linux+ certification. He lives in Waterford MI with his wife Krystal and son Alan.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider
Concerning the negative points you have noticed, at first I thought it was a joke : a cosmetic detail, something you’ve heard… If that’s all Fedora 13 is a dream !
I’ve tried the Mint 9 x64 Live CD, but no luck. The boot process can’t go on. It had problem with my Asus K40IN Nvidia Geforce G102M. I’ve tried a few times with diferrent media Live CD (I suspect the problem with bad media CD, so I burnt the Mint with another media CD), but still the same problem arise. I’ve tried to install to another laptop with VGA Intel 4500 (use the same media Live CD as above), and the process completed successfully. So I think the problem wasn’t the media CD.
Desperately, I’d like to try the Fedora 13 x64. So I downloaded the Fedora 13 x64 Live CD & burnt it. At first, the same boot problem with Mint, arise. After searched the internet & wiki, I add command: “nomodeset vesa” at the Live CD boot menu & the boot process run smoothly. After that, I try to install the Fedora 13 to my Asus laptop & it completed successfully. So now, I’m using Fedora 13 & very happy with it.
Curiously, I even tried the solution I’ve found with Mint, but still no success. The same problem arise
I agree, that the Fedora isn’t as easy as Ubuntu derivatives. Before I’ve used Ubuntu 9.04 x64 with the same laptop. For example, when I’d like to extract the rar archives. I must search & download from http://rpm.pbone.net. Where in Ubuntu, it worked out of the box.
As with the Nvidia driver, I’m using Nvidia Geforce 195-….sh driver, that I’ve downloaded from Nvidia website. The steps I took:
1. su – l
2. telinit 3
3. sh NVIDIA-195….sh
4. telinit 5
5. Done
That’s all. Please forgive me for my bad english
Not that easy, nouveau has to be disabled on grub otherwise system won’t boot.
Fedora 13 has one very cool feature which will be included in every new distribution after it.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ColorManagement
this new feature is very important for those who work with graphics.
Fedora decided to use clearlooks as it helps test the default gnome distribution. Hence by keeping packages as pristine as possible, the other projects that are part of Fedora get their share of testing too. This was true even for the previous release of Fedora.
This is the first distro I can run with compiz and watch full screen videos with other windows open. I have tried to solve the problem with the propriatory nvidia drivers, but there seems to be no solution. When I heard fedora 13 had 3d in nouveau, I burned the live cd to check it out. And amazingly it worked. So now I am running fedora 13.
I do miss how some things are much easier in ubuntu and pcliunuxos (my last two I used). But at least everything works now.
Take a look:
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05783
If you have memory run it from ram and apreciate the show!
Both Fedora Goddard and Ubuntu Lucid Lynx does not fixed this crappiest issue ever: Intel video onboard have not drivers and the sucker that upgraded to these new versions simply does not work. I’m using a Gigabyte mobo model GA-G31M-ES2C.
I tried this xorg.conf as follows and have not success:
Section \Screen\
Identifier \Default Screen\
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection \Display\
Depth 16
Modes \1280×1024\ \1024×768\ \800×600\
EndSubSection
SubSection \Display\
Depth 24
Modes \1280×1024\ \1024×768\ \800×600\
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section \Module\
Load \glx\
EndSection
Section \Device\
Identifier \Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller\
Driver \i915\
EndSection
The only distro using the new kernel I’ve resolved that issue is Mint Isadora, based on Lucid Lynx. In that release I fixed the problem and I’m running jus fine in all video resolutions. In Fedora 13 and in Ubuntu 10.04 the only one resolution allowed for my videocard is 800×600.
If anyone there know a good solution post please here and I thank in advance.
last day, i try to install fedora 13 on my laptop, i think fedora 13 is support btrfs file system, but no.
how to enable btrfs on fedora 13 ?
What that release of Fedora Linux makes clear is that with KDE 4.X Linux is going to be an elites software… because only a small number of people with top of the line PCs will be able to use it!