Fedora 9... um... maybe not?

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking part in my sister-in-law's wedding. A long time friend of hers was doing the music, and was just using his laptop, which had a cumbersome installation of Windows Vista. He's a network server admin-type guy as his day-job, and he just grumbled that the machine he had wasn't quite "Vista Ready".

So, strangely enough, he says, I might just use Knoppix. Perfect opportunity for me to suggest Fedora... except I'm sure that he'd want it to play the mp3 files he had... I wasn't really keen on suggesting it, and having him have to go through the whole "freedom is not free" baptism.

I just kind of let it go, an agreed that a Linux LiveCD might be a good alternative for the immediate situation.

So, that was the rehearsal night... and then the next day, he mentions that he heard about Ubuntu, and some co-workers said it was cool. So, I make the obligatory, "Fedora is cool too" comment, and wonder if I'm ready to officially promote Fedora to others as an option.

Strangely enough, I spent a lot of my spare time the previous week working with the recently launched Fedora 9. I'm certainly not going to review it here, but I have some harsh, reserved criticism of the release. Not the community that produces the release, not the process that creates the release, and really not negative, but enough that I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone in casual conversation.

What the heck is with shipping a version of X that won't be supported by one of the best-supported (even if only by proprietary drivers) cards on Linux? I need nvidia's proprietary driver to do the cool stuff that makes Linux worth using for me. I realize not everyone needs the whiz-bang stuff. I realize that I could just stick with Fedora 8 until stuff "syncs up".

I understand that open-source drivers might have allowed this to not happen. I don't think the Fedora Project is presenting this as a "they should open up their drivers" or a "free or else" kind of thing. It's just a bad schedule conflict. However, since the next release of fedora will be out in half a year... and Fedora is always on the bleeding edge, I'm inclined to roll back to the release of 8.

Does that make me a hater? I know what does make me a hater. I responded to Ms. Duffy's blog post asking "what are you waiting for" with a rather snide remark about how the media art wasn't as easy to use as the last release. In short, I got brief instructions on how to modify the source to meet my needs, and an invite to participate if I felt that they were inadequate. Mo said it was a lot of work to produce what they did last release. What I wanted to convey, but probably didn't was that they should have done it again, as I appreciated it last time.

I might just have to join up and contribute. I've slept on it a couple of nights, and I'm over my initial funk about the last time I tried.