[Hampshire] First impressions of Fedora 10

Just a quick summary of my initial impressions of Fedora 10 from a 30min
play last night using a usb'd version of the live-cd.

Setting the scene:

Acer 5920 with Core Duo 2 T7300 @ 2Ghz, 2 gigs ram, Intel X3100, 160gig
sata hdd, dvd-writer.

Came with vista home premium, has run Fedora 8 almost exclusively since
being purchased (dual boot) as other people in the forum have noted, vista
is just way too slow on a machine of this spec!

Fedora 10:

Boot time is very fast! I'm impressed with the new parallel boot process
startup time is noticeably faster than Fedora 8 despite running of quite a
slow usb stick. I like the progress bar, but is text only as the graphical
one is only supported on ati radeon cards.. roll on intel support :)

VT changes confused me at first, Fedora now boots with the graphical
display on tty1 (ctrl+alt+f1) rather than the more usual tty7. Thinking
about it this is a much more sensible way of doing things (how would the
uninitiated guess f7?) but confused me when pressing ctrl+alt+f1 didn't
give me a console!

Wireless worked flawlessly out of the box (iwl3945) and associated with my
access point faster than Fedora 8 (once I remembered my wpa pass phrase!).
It also appears that the latest version of NetworkManager allows pass
phrases to be stored without having to have a separate keyring password at
long last (having to type passwords twice was always annoying). It was
even able to turn on the network card after power fail, in fedora if I let
the laptop run flat by mistake I had to re-boot to vista to re-enable the
wireless card.

Sound worked ok, not 100%, but better than Fedora 8 was out of the box,
this is intel HDA audio and it isn't quite right, there is probably some
extra config I need to do, but it seems to think that the right hand
speaker is the main volume control which makes things sound a little odd.
My laptop volume control didn't work out of the box, but when I went to
assign the global shortcut key, the volume control keys are unrecognised
as "volume up" & "volume down" so not having them assigned seems very odd!

I also had numerous problems with the sound playback not being flawless,
just playing a test sound stuttered quite a lot, despite the fact that
Fedora 10 is supposed to have a new Pulse Audio which makes this sort of
thing not happen any more! I need to do more testing in this area to
ensure it works cleanly.

Suspend to ram works flawlessly, again much faster than Fedora 8, possibly
even on a par with Vista now (about the only thing vista seems to do
quickly). But it shows a text screen during suspend and resume which isn't
very user friendly.

KDE4... well I like the style, but the menus, window decoration etc. are
not as good as KDE3 in Fedora 8, lots of wasted space around icons etc. I
will have to tweak that when I do a real install. I also hate the new
start menu where the menu moves around inside a box, I don't find it very
intuitive. That combined with the "single click" behavior in the file
browser made life hard to start with. I also really struggled to find the
correct settings they appear to have moved things in the control panel and
it isn't ways where you would expected (e.g. sound notifications, such as
startup sound etc. are no longer under a "sound and multimedia" section,
but in simply "notifications").


Things still to test before upgrading:

* 3D graphics
* TV output
* Audio playback (mp3)
* Movie (SD & HD) playback both on the LCD and via TV out.
* Bluetooth
* Infrared
* DVD-Writing


Summary:

Overall I'm impressed. I need to find out what is wrong with the audio and
see what options I have to fix that before I will upgrade. The desktop
style needs adjusting so as not to waste so much of my valuable laptop
screen (only 1280x800). Assuming I can sort those things out then I will
be upgrading soon, I'm sure I will get used to the new KDE style
eventually