I skipped the last two Fedora releases on my laptop as
I was worried that the instability to new functionality ratio would be too high.
I took the plunge with Fedora 11 though as I thought it might be harder
to stick with older releases, especially considering the new forward incompatible rpm format.
Also in this release is the change from ext3 to ext4 as the default file system,
so I decided to do a new install rather than an upgrade.
So after 1 days use, here is my review compared to Fedora 8.
In summary a lot of new stuff has gone into this release, but it was released a little early.
The good
- Startup time improved from 90s to 60s
- There are some wireless improvements
- No longer prompted 3 times for wireless password when out of range
- wireless no longer takes a burst of CPU every 6s scanning
- Extra laptop keys like multimedia, standby, brightness, etc. work without setup
- Sound works without needing to
unmute PCM
. Also PCM name is only on advanced volume controls - relatime is now officially in the kernel to help hard disk performance and reliability
- There are some window manager improvements
- Maximize (Alt-F10) is a toggle
- If you unmaximise a window, then doing a vertical maximise correctly doesn't horizontal maximise
- If you toggle gnome-terminal fullscreen and back, then doing a maximise correctly doesn't fullscreen
- Bottom panel is no longer ignored when maximising vertically
- gnome-terminal now supports combining characters
- The less command no longer ignores window resize signals (when viewing man pages for e.g.)
- Virtual consoles work without requiring to add vga=791 kernel param in grub.conf
- Package repository selection and updates management GUIs worked nicely
- Firefox 3.5b4 and Thunderbird 3.0b3 are included
The bad
- Compared to the package repository and update GUIs the
add/remove software
GUI lags a bit- It spun CPU for several minutes when I clicked on all packages
- Old versions of packages were shown for selection alongside new versions
- When selecting packages you get no summary of size/space left
- No progress for downloads/installs
- My terminal font at least (monospace 8) is still messed up wrt letter spacing. I still had to reset the DPI to 96 from 98 in, System → Preferences → Look and Feel → Appearance → Fonts → Details
- Subpixel smoothing is still not enabled by default for my LCD
- gnome-terminal defaults to tango palette. That's a big change as terminal colours are important to me. So I reset to linux palette
- nautilus no longer displays dirs with invalid encoding. It does display files but shows "(invalid encoding)" beside them. The replacement characters make this obvious already
- The initial grub prompt has messed up background
- LCD backlight brightness is set to 50% on battery. Can't find where to change that. 75% would be better
- When backlight dims on idle, hitting "make brighter" key actually darkens. Need to release keys and try again. Note "dim when idle" is deselected and it still dims
- Firefox doesn't seem to do image interpolation?
- Firefox starts up offline if the network is down, so I can't access http://localhost/ for example. [Update Dec 2009: I noticed the toolkit.networkmanager.disable setting in about:config to disable this feature]
- The new tigervnc viewer requires the -UseLocalCursor=0 parameter to interact with x11vnc sessions at least
- Tapping on top right of the touchpad no longer does a middle click
- Keyboard shortcuts set on standard window manager aren't used by compiz. Even defaults are different (Alt-F10 is just maximise, not toggle maximise)
- Often when resuming after pressing Fn+Standby keyboard combo to suspend, the system will suspend immediately again. This happens with both 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels. This happens only rarely when the system is suspended/resumed by closing and opening the lid. See bug 475585
The ugly
- I get a hard hang most of the time on resume, with a kernel oops in hres_timers_resume from pm-suspend.
See Bug 499651.
The workaround for this is to disable cpufreq before suspending.
I tried the fedora testing kernel
(following instructions for enabling testing packages).
However that didn't help, so I updated to the rawhide kernel (2.6.30). That did seem to fix the resume problem,
but wasn't usable due to it's own particular problems:
- Wrong resolution for the boot splash screen (1024x768). Then in X, windows within top left 1024x768 maximises to this size. Windows outside this area maximise correctly.
- The flash plugin 10.0 r22 with Firefox 3.5b4 just spins CPU after about 10s of video. Video playback stops. Also system volume controls don't work after playing flash vid. [Update Jul 2009: This is also present with the official 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.i586 kernel update, and requires relogin to reactivate sound (restart pulseaudio). See bugs 506075 and 513855]
- Anaconda didn't update my grub.conf. Instead it overwrote it and set the Fedora 8 partition I selected to be chain loaded. Tricky enough to work around, requiring UUID lookup and grub config editing
- Firefox has general.smoothScroll on by default. Way too slow
- Moving cursor around in a HTML file in vim takes 100% CPU (even without scrolling). 80 for vim, 15 for X, 5 for gnome-terminal. scrolling C is better. The workaround is to disable parenthesis matching for HTML files
- compiz was much faster on Fedora 8 on my 915GM laptop. It's unusable on Fedora 11 really. For example Alt-tab and Shift-Alt-up were very slow. I understand there has been lots of graphics changes in linux lately, but I wasn't expecting such a performance hit. Personally I don't use desktop effects anyway as I haven't noticed any functional benefit
- As in Fedora 8, if the HDD password is enabled in the BIOS, reads from the hard disk fail after resume
- inkscape just spins the CPU. If you strace it and detach it starts working correctly?
© Jun 17 2009