Linuxblog Introduction: We took an average windows user, gave her a handful of distributions of Linux, and forced her to use each distro for one week. We gave her alsaconf, email servers, and mounted her windows partition to the fresh install. Then, we faded away and quietly watched her in her new environment. You too can join us by reading on…
Editors Note: More screenshots would accompany this review, but problems with software/hardware prevented many things from happening. Read on for more.
1) Look/Feel – as far as the look of this distro goes…everything is very nice and professional. This one is extremely easy on the eyes. I was excited at the chance to get to use the gnome desktop by default. I really like the way the menu bar is at the top instead of the bottom. I don’t like the fact that there are very few choices in the menu’s for anything. But overall, everything seems very nice. (Score – 8 )
2) Performance – Slow! With a capital “S”! During my first login, the desktop took approximately 45 seconds to login then froze. So we restarted and tried it again. It improved to 40 seconds but didn’t freeze this time. When clicking on menu’s it isn’t too bad…but whenever I open a program it takes forever and a year to open it up. This is horrible. (Score – 2)
3) Hardware/Software – This was a big issue for me as well. I don’t like the fact that there is very little choice in the menus. Also the fact that it is extremely difficult for me to download and install things (something I haven’t figured out yet in Linux) and that it doesn’t have many choices for software makes it useless for me. Fedora seemed to install all my hardware correctly though. (Score – 5)
4) Upgradeability/Security – Yet again this subject is lost on me. I have to trust that things are secure. Upgrading is a mystery for me. I’ve gotta be fair to this one so I’ll give it what I give every distro. (Score – 10)
5) Documentation – There is loads of documentation available from the Fedora website. However, none of this actually helps me at all. Being a new user this is like looking at a new language to me. I don’t understand any of it. It might be great for other people but it doesn’t help me out at all. Still, they’ve got great organization in place and a very detailed site, so they will score a bit high on this. (Score – 9)
6) Installation – Everything was very straightforward. They have an excellent graphic installation thing. Very easy to use. This might even be easier than Windows. It wasn’t a long installation either. It would be great if all of the distros installed like this. (Score – 10)
And now…once again…it is time for my criteria…
Continue reading “Experiment 1.4: Fedora Core 4 Test 1 Final Rating”
