My Fedora 15 beta experiences so far

[alan at clueserver.org]

I have to admit, this is the most painful Fedora installation I have ever
done. (And I have used them all.)

The networking came up as IPv6 *only*. My router does not do IPv6 and my
ISP (Qwest) does not know when their network ever will. In order to get it
to work I had to hack files in /etc/sysconfig and use dhclient to get an
address since the Network Manager applet is dumbed down to absolute
worthlessness. (More on that later.)  The networking problems seem to have
been fixed, but there were far too many of them. (Having no default route
for fixed IP addresses was a pain.)

If I were to grade Gnome 3 it would be "incomplete".  It looks nice, but
it is missing large chunks of functionality. For example, network
configuration is useless. Gnome screen saver's config panel is no where to
be found. To switch the desktop with a mouse now takes 2-3 clicks where it
used to take one. There are no applets to be found. The desktop is bare,
unless you use an the Gtweakui program to hack it. (Which most users will
not ever know about since it is not installed by default.) The option to
use the "classic style" is a lie. It is still Gnome 3, but with a
kinda-sorta Gnome 2 look. (With all the above still missing.)

Gnome 2 had similar problems. When it was first released, it was dumbed
down and was lacking most of the functionality of Gnome 1.  Now that they
finally have Gnome 2 working well I guess they felt they had to pitch it
all out and start over. This new design looks nice, but is not that
usable. A UI should make it easier to get to what you want to do, not add
useless mouse clicks.

My biggest complaint though is the kernel. I am getting kernel panics in
ext4! (When I can get a log I will post it. It does not get written to
disk since the filesystem dies.)

Another thing... I cannot find a way to disable the Nouveau kernel module.
I have tried all the methods that worked before (rdblacklist and the
modules blacklist.) Nothing seems to work. I am going to have to rebuild
the kernel rpm. Why is this more difficult?

The reason I went to this version when I did was due to a sort of double
bind.  Fedora 13 uses 2.6.34. USB3 does not work well with that kernel. (I
have already spoken with the maintainer. She thinks she knows the cause
and is going to backport the patch.) 2.6.35+ works with USB3, but another
program I use often does not work with my hand-rolled kernel. (Threading
issue.) Upgrade seemed like a good option. Now I am not so sure.

Hopefully I will be able to make this thing work.  I may have to go to KDE
for a bit until the Gnome developers finish writing it. (How long that
will take, I have no idea...)