Fedora Core 4 Reviewer Finds It Bloated

Provataki writes "TuxTops reviews Fedora Core 4 and finds a number of problems with the popular distribution: high memory usage, usability problems, bugs, bloat. They awarded FC4 with 6 out of 10 at the end as despite its quirks they also find it a 'powerful distro' and easy to use."

Re:FC4 still runs too many services...

[J.Y.Kelly]

The cutting down of the core distribution was an intentional decision and is arguably a good rather than a bad thing. It arose from the (eventual) appearance of Fedora extras which is the community maintanined set of packages for fedora. This marks a passing of control from Redhat to the community and pushes Fedora towards being the community oriented distribution it was promised to be. You can expect that the core FC5 distribution will be even smaller than FC4 with more packages moved to Extras. What was bad about the FC4 release is that Extras has yet to be tied in to the installer, which means that the installing or upgrading of these packages must be done post install. One of the goals for FC5 is to have Extras available at install time.

More reviews

[youknowmewell]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1830880,00.as p [eweek.com]

http://www.osjournal.com/content/85/Reviews/A_look _at_Fedora_Core_4/ [osjournal.com]

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2 005/6/28/prodit/11304408&sec=prodit [star-techcentral.com]

These reviews aren't quite so negative as the review posted on /. . Funny how that is.

FC4 is pretty good

[frag thief]

Aint variety grand? I'm running FC4 and love it.

Sure it has some kinks, but I accept that since Fedora tends to push the envelope. It's really not 'Linux for Mom' like Ubuntu. Fedora requires some heavy lifting and some RTFM-ism. I've always liked Gnome and 2.10 with Clearlooks is just gorgeous. FC4 boots faster and does a good job of detecting hardware. A week or two ago I swapped my motherboard and processor and it booted up with everything working -- despite my changing 90% of the chipset including sound and networking.

Can you imagine doing that on a Windows box?

Yes, multimedia is emasculated thanks to software patent boogeymen in the US. I do all my ripping to OGG Vorbis anyway which is supported out of the box. I've yet to find any use for the Helix movie player though.

I got caught up in the flaming when Redhat "abandoned" the free desktop but that turned out to be a lot of hype. I even went looking for a replacement after Redhat 9 but kept coming back to Fedora. I really like their "workstation" install.

For me, Fedora occupies a comfortable zone between "I can install it it in 30 mins" and "I can use it for just about any need."