Fedora 8 Test 3 Thoughts

Being the avid Fedora user I am, I couldn't wait to try out the final test release of Fedora 8. I am excited for a few key features of Fedora 8, mainly Iced Tea (a OpenJDK implementation) and CodecBuddy. The full list of features can be found here. The Fedora 8 Test 3 LiveCD can be downloaded here. Without further ado, I'll break down what I saw as the good and the bad of Fedora 8 Test 3.

The Good

I really liked the Nodoka theme, I think it will succeed in making the Fedora desktop stick out in the crowd, as well as give it a look Fedora users can associate with it. The default wallpaper is also a devatation from the norm, not even including the Fedora logo in any way. In keeping with the trend of using all OSS, the Fedora team has included Abiword instead of OO.org Writer as the default word processor. Iced Tea preforms as expected, with one minor glitch (to be covered in the next section). With the addition of CodecBuddy and a cleaned up GUI for package management, Fedora is becoming easier to use, while still maintaining its high OSS standards.

The Bad

There is no Firefox Iced Tea plugin. I am hoping that the Iced Tea team will make this a priority and we will have one in the near future. Also, my dual screen configuration was not automatically detected (while not really a 'bad' thing, it is something that Windows and Mac OS are very good at, and Linux in general needs to get better at detecting and managing). The old bluecurve icon set is still being used, and although it doesn't look horrible with the Nodoka theme, I am ready to move on to a new default icon set (my personal favorite is Echo).

Conclusions

With the release of Test 3, the Fedora team has once again shown their dedication to providing people with the easiest to use fully Open OS. Keep it up guys!