I’m not sure what I think of Gnome 3’s Shell Interface. Imma try it out but I think they may have fallen into the trap of making the desktop the point rather than, well, emacs and a web browser the point (the only two pieces of software I use every day and both days). Either way, Fedora 15 looks interesting, and it does use Gnome 3 Shell.
Linux in Exile has a review. The LIE author is really into Fedora, and seems to know a lot about it, so this is rather useful. Here.
I’ve been using Fedora 15 since just before the beta release because I wanted to give Gnome 3 a try, and I really like it. I even replaced Ubuntu with it on my work computer because Unity had a few problems that annoyed me when using dual monitors (I’m unable to reproduce any of these problems on my home computer where I use Ubuntu with only one monitor). This is my first time using Fedora for more than a day or two and I’ve found it to be better than what I expected.
I’ve been using Ubuntu on my home computer with two monitors since Hardy Heron, at least. I use the Nvidia closed source driver, which works fine. Gnome Shell works on that set up as well (I just experimented a bit) but I may like it even less now that I’ve actually tried it. But I would need to give it more time to try getting used to it.
I am seriously thinking about going to a simple windows manager and forgetting about the desktop. I might add a third monitor as well.
I never had any problems with Ubuntu and dual monitors before (also using the Nvidia driver). I installed the 11.04 beta to try out Unity a few days ago and there were a few small things that went wrong, though these were functional problems instead of display issues. The biggest one I can think of right now was that if I had a window maximized, the close, minimize, and maximize buttons up in the menu bar would often disappear. I could get them back by un-maximizing the window or switching to a different one and then back, but that quickly became too much of a hassle so I thought I’d give Gnome Shell a try. I also like the look of Gnome Shell a bit more. I’m also really impressed with a few other things in Fedora (especially yum), though the install didn’t go as smoothly as a Ubuntu one normally does. This isn’t really a problem for me, but I could see how it might turn others away.
I’ve switched to the newest version of KDE. I used to despise it, but I despise gnome-3 and unity even more. It’s good to see that Linux is ever evolving in any case and has so many choices.
Unity is a smartphone environment applied to the Desktop. It’s broken Ubuntu, and I’m thinking of switching. Haven’t used Fedora since version 8 or 9, I’ll probably stay with the Debian-based distros, maybe Mint.
With every new release of Fedora, I have to ask: what will they break this time?
The problem is that they incorporate all the bold new stuff with the initial release, and of course there are bugs. Often the bugs don’t get fixed until the next release. Which of course, features a new crop of bugs.
I get tired of submitting bug reports to bugzilla.redhat, only to see them ignored until eventually they get closed not due to being fixed, but because they are moving on to a new release.
I gave up on GNOME and KDE both around the time KDE4 first was released. Gimme openbox on Arch Linux and I’m a happy camper.