Screaming Penguin

So Fedora Core 4 is taking fire. TuxTops calls it bloated while NewsForge complains about what ISN'T there. Now, I have been using RedHat distros since long about the 4.6 era. There have been ups and downs along the way, and I don't think Fedora Core 4 is going to go down as a highlight. I have had quite a number of problems with it myself, mostly related to WiFi drivers. The IPW2200 drivers that came out of the box just flat didn't work on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, and I had to download and compile new ones myself. To top it off, after the kernel upgraded the first time with up2date the drivers wouldn't even compile against the new one, so I have been stuck using the original kernel on the Dell. Of course power management (specifically, coming back from a suspend) is shotty, but that is about par for the course with Linux's general laptop thing anyway. Additionally, it didn't include the MADWiFi drivers for Aetheros cards, which made getting my D-Link card inthe desktop working a chore. Even getting MadWiFi to build was a pain because FC4 didn't install (WTF!) uuencode/uudecode by default, and they are in a non-intuitively named RPM I had to look up on the Fedora forums to find. Of course with each of the kernel patches I have to rebuild my nVidia drivers, MadWiFi and on and on. It is a frustrating task. I will, however, say that the upgrade process from FC3 on the desktop was about as easy as it could possibly be. The NewsForge reviewer mentions media playback. I have never really worried much about that, since I always get JuK (which again isn't in the distro) and the venerable VLC (yadda yadda). VLC is great because it generally includes everything and just plays anything at all. However, since there still isn't an official VLC from VideoLan.org for FC4, I built it myself once (which is a serious chore given all the driver libs and whatsit you have to get) and installed from the Livna repo once. Both installs have way more issues than I expect from VLC (though my hand built one works WAY better than the Livna one). All in all, I don't think the distro is bloated. If anything, I really feel they need to up the driver support in the kernel in a big way. I think there is also simply an issue with packages that get installed by default. Frankly, that UU packages aren't just "there" is a serious weird thing to me, and they continue to spread the KDE packages around the package tree so it is a PITA to just say, "Give me all the KDE software". And finally, I really wish things like Mono and Beagle would start appearing at least in the FC Extras repo. Is FC4 great? No. This is definitely not going down on the (7.2/9.0) list of my favorite RedHats. However, it isn't that bad either, and won't be on my list of least favorites (6x/8.0) either