More Experiences Moving to Fedora 18

More Experiences Moving to Fedora 18

Here are more experiences more experiences moving from Ubuntu to Fedora 18.

Pros

Smoother integration of certain services, like the Updater. It doesn’t require a password much of the time.

Firewall-Config

After a month or two in Fedora, I discovered a really nice graphical program for configuring my firewall! At first glance and after a simple few tasks, I think it works very nicely with SELinux as well. This is a very pleasant surprise.

Neutral

SELinux: Though I was aware of what SELinux, I had never specifically used it. I must give credit to the nice desktop user interface. For example, I needed to enable additional permissions for Firefox to use some Flash at one point. The GUI for SELinux was really easy to understand; just copy and paste this command into a console to enable that permission.

But on the slight downside, I was not able to configure my SSH exactly as I wanted until I figured out how to configure the firewall. This actually makes sense but wasn't easy for me to find the problem spot. I spent a long time attempting to configure SELinux and months later stumbled upon , and I'm not sure if it is a SELinux problem or not.

Cons

General Users

SELinux can be a pain to the average user unless there's something there to help them. I'm pretty a pretty advanced user in Linux and using SELinux is not simple or convenient. Fedora has a nice little helper System-Tray application but that's still not very useful.

For example, I routinely browse a website that uses flash. To allow certain features, such as saving a screen capture of the flash portion of the website, I have to run a SELinux command.

This wouldn't be a problem, except it is not simple or trivial to make this setting permanent. It's not readily apparent how to do this, so I essentially have to run this command every single day, every time I boot my computer up. Doing such a needlessly repetitive task to enable a certain feature is very Microsoft-Windows-esc, and should not be a problem on the Linux Desktop. There should be an easier way to do this.

Sadly I have to now go read some long and incredibly detailed manuals on SELinux, when I just want to browse a fucking website. Ugh.

This is a real Con, and I never had to do with this before.

Development

Third-Party Fedora Support
Interestingly, I didn’t realize that the world had really jumped onboard with the Ubuntu craze. So many places where I have downloaded software for use in development now only list Ubuntu, instead of Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu or some more generic Linux form.

I really hope this is somewhat problematic for me, other than a minor headache with papercuts in using their Ubuntu-focused software.

Fedora Free Open-Source Software Ideology
While I really really like the Free and Open-Source Software ideology, this has actually been a little troubling in Fedora. For example, it is currently quite difficult to add an proper Oracle Java repository to my system.

While I really like OpenJDK when it works, current development projects of mine require the official Oracle JDK. I also want a repository on my system to handle this, especially for updates. I shouldn’t have to watch the news like a hawk for Java updates.

Yum
There are some features I really like about Yum, such as transaction history and undo-features, and a very nice console interface. But they are also not perfect. Aside from being slower than Apt, it is missing two very nice features. “apt-get autoremove” and the ability to perform a “dry-run” sort of simulation, though the later is really not that big of a deal for me.

I’ve yet to find an easy and convenient way to automatically remove unused dependencies (aka “orphaned” packages).

Also the dist-upgrade command doesn't seem quite as straightforward as the apt version.

Google Music

Not sure that Fedora should be blamed for this, but the Google Music manager is NOT working for me. I've tried the 32 and 64 bit versions, including completely deleting the configuration files under my home directory. Nothing works.

I don't know what to do but this is very annoying.