my impressions of F19A, from Radeon testing day

[DJ Delorie]

Not sure how many of these are specific to the Radeon driver, but I
kept notes as I went through the whole install/test process, and I'm
including them here in case they help anyone.  I'm available for more
detailed testing if needed.

hardware:

Intel six-core i7-EE, 24GB RAM, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard
ATI Radeon HD 6870 with four monitors (one 30", two rotated 20", one 23")

My monitor setup is: one 30" 2560x1600 in the middle, one 20"
1200x1600 (rotated) on each side, and the 1080p way off on the right.

Basic install went OK.

"Welcome" dialog is on rightmost monitor, not main monitor (the black
Gnome menu is on main monitor).

After the screen saver kicked in, it wasn't obvious how to leave the
giant clock screen (none of the usual key presses or mouse clicks did
anything).  Only later was I shown the up-arrow thing but clicking on
it did nothing.  Eventually I tried swiping it which worked after a
few tries.  Swiping a clock up a 30" monitor isn't the most natural
way to disable a screensaver.

No options in keyboard layout window - it brought up a blank list and
made me "pick"  one.

It then asks to create local account despite already doing so in
anaconda.  Could not skip or re-enter same data.  Anaconda should tell
you that the account you create *there* is *not* an admin, and that
you will be *required* to create yet another account later, which *is*
an admin.

After "start gnome", main screen went solid white until ESC pressed.
Only later did I realize it was supposed to play a movie (sound wasn't
configured yet).  The movie tells me to press a key that doesn't exist
on my keyboard.

Resizing firefox is VERY slow - about 2-3 FPS.

analog 5.1 "test speakers" emits no output to subwoofer (the other 5
speakers worked fine)

Digital spdif output does not have options for surround sound *at all*
(the hardware is known-good under F17).

Xrandr settings should be site-wide, not personal (esp, they're
ignored for the greeter screen).  The greeter is hard to use because
you can't keep track of where the cursor is due to the misconfigured
screens.

Xrandr changes turn the screen to random garbage for a few seconds
before reconfiguring.

Xrandr display setup app doesn't work right for four monitors - it
requires pairs of monitors to be touching, making it difficult to set
up.  Example: if you change the rotation for the #3 monitor, you can't
place it next to the #1 monitor - just next to the #4 monitor (or very
far away from it).  In my case, #3 was the one to the left of the main
monitor, which took a few minutes to do.  I've played puzzle games on
my phone which were less tricky than using this app.

Also, the monitor icons are very tiny - like, 5mm tall on my 30"
monitor.

At some points, gnome brought up a light-grey-on-lighter-grey themed
dialog, which looks like a disabled dialog and is hard to read.

I could not find out how to update the system software with gnome3.
No notifications popped up, and there were no apps to "check for
software updates".  The software install tool didn't have such an
option.  I ended up running "yum update" from a terminal (which did
update software).

totem segfaults running NET_MAN.ogg  (known bug)

pymol starts on the wrong monitor - it starts on the far right
monitor, not the main monitor.

pymol transparency demo doesn't work
- and coredumps on exit

tuxkart - native screen resolution (2560x1600) is not offered,
"fullscreen" core dumps.

hmmm... right side monitor is now a clone of left side monitor after
this test.  (fixed by switch-user)

xonitic corrupts xrandr settings - switches everything to "mirrored"
mode, which means every screen has the same game on it, two of them
sideways and all of them distorted.  *Not* fixed by switch-user.

0ad isn't playable - the "ok" button to start the game is drawn on a
spot on my desktop that doesn't map to a monitor, so I can't click it.

Minecraft won't run.  I assume this is due to an interaction between
an old gaming library on their part and the use of our java instead of
oracle's (i.e. it's a standard setup, not my usual custom one), but
the traceback was in the xrandr setup routines.

--

All in all, I found F19A's Gnome to be just as hard to use as I
recalled in F17 and F18, and support for my four-monitor setup to be
just as poor as in the past.  Perhaps F19 would run fine on a tablet
but it's a non-starter for me without heavy customization.