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."

FC4 still runs too many services...

[rklrkl]

Fedora Core 4 still runs too many services that are not required, particularly in a PC desktop environment (e.g. software RAID monitor, at daemon, PCMCIA support, ACPI, cpuspeed), but they can be turned off fairly easily.

Ironically, the one disappointing feature of FC4 is that the DVD distro has actually been *cut down* compared to FC3's DVD - many packages (some of which are wildly popular like abiword, xmms or tuxracer) have been surprisingly moved off of even the DVD and shunted into Fedora Extras as an optional download instead. I think this was a knee-jerk response to people complaining that FC3 took up 4 CD's - fair enough, but why not keep the "bloat" for the FC4 DVD then and leave those packages off the CD version?

BTW, it always pays to wait a few weeks for initial bugs to be ironed out in Fedora releases - FC4's Firefox couldn't use the Sun Java plug-in with SELinux enabled until they released a policy patch to sort this out for instance. Mind you, I think the Anaconda installer should optionally allow you to download updates before it completes its installation - SuSE's YaST does, so why not not Anaconda?

Re:Not a Fan

[Professor_UNIX]

I think what people are forgetting is that Fedora Core was never designed to be a stable distribution. It's there to shake out the bugs before stuff moves into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Re:Can't we do better?

[Phisbut]

It's a sad state of affairs when a fourth generation release of probably the best supported Linux distro available can only gain a 6 out of 10 rating.

It got a 6 out of 10 from one reviewer who wasn't even able to get a DVD working... I mean, I know nothing about that guy, but the simple fact that he couldn't get a DVD working (while I installed FC4 from DVD on 3 different computers, with 3 completely different settings; and I'm also quite sure thousands of other people installed from DVD without any problem), doesn't give him a whole lot of credibility to me.

What he encountered is not a problem with the distribution, it's an anecdote.

Without a GUI

[bzant]

I run FCx on many of my home servers, without the GUI, and I have found them all to be very stable, low memory consumption, and easy to update.

I just installed FC4 on a file server so I will see how that goes, but I expect it will be solid as the others.

And if you don't like the packages that come with FC4, roll your own, I don't install the default httpd, I always get the source and compile my own.

I like the FCx distros, 'cause it is easy to get a solid base install of a very current kernel. When I am trying to manage many servers across multiple locations, I just want something that works.

Re:Bloat what bloat?

[int19h]

I understand this attitude, of "do it yourself if you are unhappy", since meritocracies often work, but this kind of thinking is flawed, IMHO.

In extreme cases of meritocracy:
- You are not allowed to wish for anything, unless you do it yourself
- You are not allowed to report a bug, unless you do it yourself
- You are not allowed to express your opinion about something, unless you FIX IT YOURSELF. (yelling intended) ;)

I would much rather have a world where people are allowed to express themselves about things like open source software, and discuss it, than having to fix it themselves right away.

If users weren't able to state negative sides about the software, there would be no valuable feedback.

So, please: Even though a coder is worth a gazillion critics, let people say what they feel without telling them to fix it themselves. :-)

Wrong interpretation.

[kosmosik]

This is common newbie mistake -- "Why does my system takes entire RAM aviable?" -- Well RAM is in machine to be used. What for you need RAM if it stays unused? So it is actually a *Good* *Thing* that most of the RAM is used - it means that operating system is working good with memory management.

What was wrong? The interpretation. I've bet that author stated full memory usage but hasn't bother to check how much of this "used" RAM was taken by system buffers and how much by real applications? I use Fedora day to day on my laptop - I've tweaked it a bit (to be honest). Disabled services, use WindowMaker instead of bloated GNOME/KDE, Opera instead of Mozilla etc. After boot -- X11 with WindowMaker, few services (postgres, httpd for developement) -- the system (not buffers) takes ~50MB RAM, but of course free(1) shows ~240MB (with system buffers).

This guy is clueless

[VStrider]

From TFA:

the installation screen won't initialized and load without beforehand adding the "nofb" or the "vga=971" command in the kernel configuration line.
On certain hardware you need to pass these options, no matter what distro you're installing. Are you complaining about having to type a few extra characters on his first boot?

FC4 booted much faster than any previous version, still though, not as fast as other distros like Arch and Gentoo.
Gentoo is faster from other distros, but I don't see any difference on boot times. And anyway, if you're gonna complain about nofb, I can sure tell you that Gentoo is not for you. The installation is nothing but easy.

But I wasn't as happy with the memory consumption. About 230 MBs of RAM were used on a clean, default load (according to "free", just after the OS loaded -- no major cashing has occured yet).
Linux uses memory more aggressively than windows, and tries to avoid swapping, while windows does the opposite. This is the first complain I hear from windows users using linux. You need to understand that you *want* your memory to be used. The more memory is used, the faster your programs will run. And btw here's my free on Gentoo:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513828 428216 85612 0 50048 176256
-/+ buffers/cache: 201912 311916
Swap: 506008 4024 501984

As you can see, most of my RAM is used. This does not slow the system down. It has the opposite effect. Anyway, I'm glad no major 'cashing' occured on your system. :D

I find this requirement huge, it means that computers with 256 MBs of RAM will swap heavily after only a few minutes of using the system (e.g. after opening Firefox and Evolution or OOo alone).
No you got it totally wrong. See above.

I had to go and unload some services before I could see the RAM usage go down
Most of these 'services' you stopped are init scripts that run once at boot and do nothing afterwards. So your RAM usage going down is most likely the placebo effect. Get a clue.

And btw, why can't I kill completely 'eggcups' (it keeps respawning) which takes so much RAM, and I don't even have a printer in my house?
Are you serious? you cann't stop a service? And you're writing a review on a linux distro???

Also of importance is the fact that Fedora does not automount FAT/NTFS partitions and so new users will find this a bit dissapointing.
Which free distro automounts a FAT/NTFS partition? AFAIK, none. But anyway all you got to do is add 1 (ONE) line to your fstab.

Having to use "mount" in the command line or have to mess up with your /etc/fstab is hardly fun.
Is this the same guy who was talking about arch and gentoo? :D

Why did this horrible review made it on /. ?

Re:FC4 was released too early

[bill_mcgonigle]

Every Fedora Core release is released too early. That's its nature.

A Fedora Core release +6 months of patches is a really nice system you can run for a year. By that time there's another FC+6 months release available.

A new FC release is fun to have as a play/development system but noone should expect to depend on it.

bloated

[smash]

For all intents and purposes it *is* bloated.

And no, i'm not talking about memory usage - 4 CDs worth, and it didn't even detect/include apps for power management on my laptop.

Wtf? This is 2005...

Ubuntu detected everything, gave me fully working power management, etc as standard.

The package manager is brain-damaged... rather than installing from CDs in sequence, adding/removing packages after install results in swapping CDs several times (ie, CD1 is requested 2-3 times or more), rather than loading everything it needs from CD1 first, etc.

It looks pretty, but as far as use goes, its crap, imho.

smash (Linux user since 1996)