Fedora 20 review: Can the Heisenbug be eaten by the salamander

Frankly speaking, the bug can be swallowed by the salamander. but please soldier on to know why.

Fedora 20 is the latest release of fedoraproject which is sponsored by Redhat. it offers the most cutting edge technology with the latest packages available at disposal. This directly translates into more potential for bugs to be discovered which is ironic because Fedora is codenamed Heisen'bug'. yet for enthusiasts who can forgo a bit of hair on their foreheads to find out what is the latest in the field of linux development, this is the best place to start with.

the default offering comes with a now maturing gnome 3.10 which i feel is the most beautiful stock environment to look at. when most other distros are shunning away from adopting the gnome environment, Fedora has soldiered on to provided a pure, undiluted gnome experience.

firstly the visible changes from gnome 3.8 to 3.10.

the first thing you will notice is that the icons on the top have been grouped together to form an integrated system of indicators. here is how it looks

immediately there seems to be a problem. i have downloaded a gnome extension called netspeed and it does not seem to blend in with the stock extension. the stock extension is narrowly spaced whereas the downloaded ones are broadly seperated. it seems that the engineers at gnome did not use any extension that they forgot that they exist.

they also seem to have believed that an ordinary user would restart the system rather than logout and login again for changes to appear. that explains why there is no logout button.

not all things they did were bad. there is a very controversial addition which i think will pay off as comforting. that is to integrate the title bar with some buttons. here is how it looks.

 given the amount of screen real estate gnome occupies, we could use a bit of integration to save some space. this idea seems an elegant way to address the issue that windows has created by putting a separate title bar which all the others have sticked to. Of course unity is an exception with its global menu bar.

another comforting thing is that finally this feature lead to the feature of a close button option on the nautilus. till now, users had to sort to some confusion and resort for Alt+F4 or settings and quit or click on files and then quit. here is how this looks.

this feature seems to have paid off at least for me. gnome is now a less irritating experience.

coming to a more upside or more of a downside experience is the software center.

although at first glimpse it seems to be a very bright addition, it has an achilles heel. it is so newbie oriented that there do not seem to be the inclusion of any technical package. for instance, java (more specifically jre) is inbuilt in fedora. but search for java in it, it shows no results found.

on the bright side though, it is not lagging like the ubuntu software center which starts slowly or shows force quit half of the time.

there are some bugs. for instance samba would not work (file sharing compatible with windows systems). it probably is some problem with selinux or firewall. apart from that all is well aboard fedora.

my verdict is that the gnome version launched is the most successful list of changes done on an aggregate to humanize gnome which is now an almost mature environment. the features of ubuntu software center should have been included in the software app. gnome in its own way is a good environment for users.

my suggestion is that fedora takes a step to non-geekify the environment by providing repositories or a package similar to ubuntu-restricted-extras. because newbies want something easy to use like ubuntu which seems the most automated of the lot. the more geeky users would like to have arch linux for the best customization. so, it would be best if fedora aimed for any of the two categories.