Fedora 11/12 - they suck, even if pretty to look at

So I've been a fan of Fedora for a long time, starting with Fedora Core 3, and have used almost every FedoraCore/Fedora release since then, excluding two, Fedora Core 5 and 7. With this in mind, and given that I am a Linux Systems Administrator full-time, I have to say that I'm not pleased with the direction that some parts of Linux has gone to, most especially xorg and kde4.

Everyone is so outspoken about getting linux on the desktop, but to be honest, I could care less for the most part. I'm not that concerned about large-scale desktop adoption or not, as I primarily use it on servers and find it to be awesome there. I predominately support RHEL5.x on Dell PowerEdge servers, covering almost every hardware release of the last 5 years. I find RHEL4 to be "okay", and RHEL5 to be an excellent fit on that hardware. However, I didn't start this blog entry to talk about servers, I wish to detail my experiences with Desktop linux within my professional and personal life.

Since F10 came out, there has been a major change to xorg, in that xrandr is the default method to change screen controls and automagic config, and the support for either nvidia or ATI cards has, in my opinion, been crap. I find the best setup is to go with the proprietary drivers, and skip the open-source ones, as the open-source ones suck at dual-screen, OpenGL, and pretty much any 3D at all. Mind you, this is particular to the drivers for ATI, nvidia, Intel, and Matrox cards.... any others, I have no direct experience with.

I really want to revert back to FC4 or F8, as those two feel like the last time I had a really good graphics setup. When I was running FC4 and F8, both were excellent for working out video issues, and also still allowed CTRL-ALT-BKSP to kill x.org and restart it without changing run levels. Back in FC4, I feel like I had more or less mastered the ATI driver setup and xfree86/xorg, as I was able to map the dual-port ati card's framebuffers independently, and literally run separate desktops on dual-monitors. This had several advantages, in that it was easy to pin programs to a single screen, you could have independent backgrounds and screensavers, and best of all, if the xorg process died for one, the other one was still available.

For my current work system it has a Matrox P650 PCIe card, and the driver won't compile at all in F12. For this reason, I went from F11 to F12 and then back to F11, however, even in F11 the driver support is minimal at best. It can do 2D, but basically very little 3D, even though the card is capable.

That was FC4, I've not really been able to duplicate that setup since, although at least in F8, I was able to get the ATI card to run properly, with full OpenGL support, and max out the frame-rate that the card was capable of.

Ever since then though, I'd have to classify it as "hardly". Below are my experiences with F9/10/11/12 and even some Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, 9.10:

I have a lot of machines, both professionally and personally, a few of them are:
AMD Phenom II 945 QC, 8gb ram - ATI 3850 HD
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5800 - 4gb ram - ATI x1250 - Media Center machine
Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910) - Atom single-core HT - 1gb ram - Intel GMA 950
Shuttle X27-D - Dual Core Atom HT, 2gb ram - Intel GMA
Micron MPC ClientPRO 385 - P4 Dual Core - 1gb ram - Matrox P650 PCIe

So with that, I've had the following experiences:
QC AMD - Ran F10/F11 on it, runs very fast, kvm virtualization works very well, video driver support sucked, especially with large LCD monitor (25in). Ended up long-term running Vista64 with 2nd drive for F11.

Dual-core AMD - Initially started trying to build this as a media center machine using F10/F11, however, found that I could never get the video to output with digital audio over HDMI, and additionally couldn't enable HDCP support or find a blu-ray player for Linux. Wanted to run MythTV, or XBMC, but ended up going with Vista and then later XP after hard-drive upgrade and running XBMC in windows.

Mini9 - Shipped with Ubuntu 8.04 Dell LPIA edition installed - worked very well but wasn't very attractive desktop, screen sizing was messy, hibernate didn't work well. Then installed MacOSX, then after this F10 then F11. Both F10 and F11 had issues with the screen resolution, as well as the Intel video card, and on both the broadcom driver for the wi-fi would cause a kernel panic if enabled while the on-board ethernet was plugged in. Never found a work-around for this, ended up wiping F11 for Windows7.

Shuttle X27D - Built it as MacOSX + F11 using GPT, and additionally had Ubuntu 9.04 on it for occasional desktop use. Used primarily as a firewall pass-through point, using Firestarter firewall. Worked very well except randomly kernel panic'd and Intel GMA graphics FAIL yet again. Upgraded to F12, and found that Firestarter wasn't available, and it also failed to boot with GPT. Had very frequent kernel panics, usually during high bandwidth use by other machines on the internal network. Ran this for a week or so, then said "f--k it", and rebuilt with Ubuntu 9.10. Ubuntu also sucked on the video, and couldn't find any updated drivers to solve the issue or mitigate the issue. Also noticed that 9.10 has gone backwards in the quality of the login screen and gnome desktop while many other items are improved. Rebuilt with 9.04 Ubuntu server, but didn't really know the command structure well enough to setup everything. Lacking the patience to relearn every command, rebuilt it again with F11 and no GPT. No longer acting as firewall as I haven't had the patience to get it working properly again.

Micron MPC - Shipped with XP, reloaded at one point with RHEL5 32bit, but most recently running F11 32bit. Worked okay, used proprietary Matrox Linux driver, which requires compilation to use, in order to use dual-screen. Xrandr couldn't detect the 2nd screen no matter what I tried. Upgraded to F12, found that Xrandr still couldn't detect 2nd screen, and Matrox driver wouldn't compile on 2.6.31 kernel. Used it for a week or so in this broken way, then reloaded F11 on 2nd partition, keeping F12 available.

Three additional machines: P3 1ghz - 512mb ram, AMD dual-core mobile touch-screen laptop, and Compaq mini-desktop P4 512mb:

The P3 was left over from early 2000's, and had seen every OS from Windows 98 up through XP and Linux variants of all kinds on it. I last had been running F10/F11 on it, however, due to having so many machines and not enough power outlets, had it plugged into the same circuit which my lamp and lightswitch are on. Once or twice I flipped the switch off on the way out the door, forgetting the P3 was plugged in, and on the 3rd time, I had drive corruption. I attribute this to the older drive technology and no caching or write-back caching. I ended up loading this with gOS a few weeks ago and donating it to a friend.

The AMD Dual-core laptop was shipped with Vista32, and I had tried various other OSs on it, such as MacOSX, XP, VectorLinux, Fedora 10, and gOS. It never worked well with Fedora, mainly due to driver support for stuff other than the video, but especially due to the touchscreen driver and touchpad drivers. I also had an issue in Vector and Fedora where it would boot partially and then stop, and not continue until I pressed the power button for a second. MacOSX had the same issue on initial load. XP was a no-go as there were no drivers for the touchscreen or wi-fi card. I had made the decision to go with MacOSX on it, except that this worked 99% except for the wi-fi. I finally returned it to Vista32, and plan to donate it to a sibling soon.

Compaq P4 - Installed with F10, but it was a poor performer due to fanless cpu and single-core. Memory was also too limited for Fedora, and it wasn't expandable. Intended to be firewall machine, but also only had 10/100 port, so finally reloaded with XP and donated to a friend.

Conclusions? I'm of the opinion for desktop OS's that the best are: MacOSX, XP, Vista 64, Windows7, and gOS. Yeah, all the major Linux distros are NOT on that list, and I don't recommend them to my family or friends either. In fact, I recommend them DSL, PuppyLinux, or gOS instead. I think that the major linux releases have really gone backwards and are no longer ready for the general public's consumption as a desktop OS.