by Lam Luu

Created on: May 31, 2009

I am proud to say that I am a Fedora fan. Maybe not "fanboy", but I love Fedora. After all, it is the distribution recommended by Linus, right? And I was very excited about the 10th version. I can say only one thing: Fedora is definitely the best GNU/Linux distro out there.

Let's talk about the weaknesses first, shall we? First and foremost, I hate the lack of xorg.conf. Okay, if you don't have technical background, that file control the main Graphic interface of the system. My laptop has an ATI GPU, so things are a bit complicated, because the default setup (for some reasons) does not work. Usually, in other distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, even earlier version of Fedora), the file xorg.conf allows me to tinker with the Graphic Interface and choose the appropriate driver. This version, well, there is none, which confused the heck out of me. Secondly, Xen support is dropped, and will not return until Fedora 12, which is really disappointing, given the fact that Fedora was the first distro to integrate that technology. For now, I have to live with KVM, which, although not bad, is slower than Xen.

With that said, let's explore what Fedora has to offer.

First, it is GORGEOUS. From the boot forward, everything is just amazing. I has always loved the blue tone of Fedora, much much much more than the weird orange-brown tone of Ubuntu (Debian and Gentoo, from my point of view, do not have a definite tone). Plus, the bootsplash is just breathtaking. When my sister first saw that, she just, well, hated me for having such beautiful system. Cambridge is amazing, and I mean that. Guys, you just have to try it out.

Secondly, I am so pleased with the policy of Fedora about official support for free software only. I confess, I use mixed system, with Adobe Flash and a bunch of codec on board. However, I am also proud that other than these things, the system is "clean." Best, I can choose to go more mixed if I wish, and this is just pleasant. There are a bunch of proprietary software in rpm (such as ATI driver, which I decided not to use in the end) which you can install trivially. This feels really good: you are in control of your system.

Thirdly, Fedora 10 is pretty fast. At least it is faster than my previous flaky Linux Mint (an Ubuntu fork). Well, maybe I has screwed the installation up too badly, but Fedora 10 speed is very pleasant. I still remembered when I upgraded from Fedora 7 to 8, and the speed feels visibly slower. No more, Fedora 10 is just great.

Fourthly,

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