[CS-FSLUG] Why I'm going back to Windoze and Mandrake Linux

[Eduardo Sanchez]

On Friday 26 March 2004 17:00, Timothy R. Butler wrote:
> 
>    Well, I think its a good choice to move back to a Free Software
> distribution. :-) Personally, I'd recommend waiting a few weeks for
> Fedora Core 2 and giving that a spin. If stuff won't compile on Red 
Hat,
> what will it compile on? 

Perhaps any standard Linux :).

The big problem that Nathan had with Xandros is present also in great 
extent in both Mandrake and Fedora/RH. Too many times I had to abandon 
a compilation simply because the distro was so tweaked that producing a 
customized package (or, simply, a less-customized one) was something 
near impossible.

You might remember, Tim, from my kde-cafe days, that I was bitten by a 
horrible Qt bug when Red Hat released KDE 2.2.2. This bug made deadkeys 
effectively dead after a window opening event. This bug was not a Qt 
bug proper, but was identified as being caused by a patch that RH 
introduced in their own Qt RPM because it would make easier the 
Japanese language input. (BTW, you might be lucky and still find the 
open bug in RH's bugzilla.)

The obvious solution would be to compile a fresh Qt without the patches, 
right? NO! simply wrong... Qt choked at two minutes of compilation.

The fact is, there are so many tweakings there, that you could have very 
hard times at occasions...

There were many. many other packages with problems. I remember 
especially a version of Gnome-meeting being unable to compile because I 
couldn't compile the prerequisite OpenH323 libraries... in RH.

> 
>   Mandrake, I fear, is headed the wrong way. It still provides the 
most
> usable desktop out of the box, IMO, but the gains Fedora has made on 
it
> in such a short time is stunning. Fedora Core 2 + GNOME 2.6 is going 
to
> be a killer desktop. 
> 

I think that Fedora Core 1 is already a killer desktop in many ways. And 
I guess FC 2 will be a killer desktop with any desktop environment, 
even with IceWM or FVWM, or AfterStep ;). I only wish three things for 
FC:

1) Provide a better KDE (i.e., make your hacks less ugly)

2) Be better performance-wise:
FC still is the SLOWEST distro I've tried here. It is amazing how 
Mandrake, being also a bloated distro, and all, is WAY faster. And 
don't mention slack, or knoppix/debian. There is simply no excuse for 
Fedora's poor performance.

Another problem that is related to this is that Fedora is SO 
resource-hungry. Fedora requires more disk space and more RAM than 
anything else (with the possible exception of SUSE) for doing the same 
tasks.

I think Mandrake does it well: It tries to be as economical as possible; 
and perhaps this is because they're European, and in Europa computers 
and any kind of electronics are not as cheap and disposable as in the 
U.S.

3) Please stop crippling your audio players, and bring back MP3 
capability! (This goes without comment)

Well, these are, as you saw, easily fixable. So, Fedora could very well 
be a killer desktop.

Blessings,

Eduardo