My 5 Minutes

24 hours in, Fedora isn't driving me as insane anymore - it was a rough start but after some percussive maintenance and genteel swearing, I've managed to overcome some of the things that irritated the hell out of me.

Gnome 3 is the devil in Fedora's details and the source of 90% of the frustrations. Like Ubuntu, Fedora seem to have gone somewhere along the line of simplifying everything without too much consideration for usability.

Peeves include no minimize or maximize natively (have to edit gconf to get it right), no shutdown and/or restart function unless I hit alt and a complete inability to add anything to desktop or taskbar without another gconf edit. Bah.*

Like Windows 8's Metro and Ubuntu's Unity, Fedora's use of "Activities" does make me lean more towards grabbing an axe and wreaking terrible vengeance on the creators but it's something I probably have to come to terms with - seems like the slippery slope we're all destined to fall down sooner or later.

For dev, I've been using LAMPP + Aptana studio + Smartgit + Chrome so I can keep it all pretty much OS independent.

Something I'd forgotten about that irritates me about Open Source OS is the inability of native players to... well, to play anything. I know it's not really their fault, proprietary codecs are everyone's enemy etc etc but it's a little hard to feel impartial when I'm unable to play any of my files without first installing VLC.

Pros:

1. I missed yum
2. Boots like a ninja; sub 30 seconds all told
3. Native handling of multiple monitors is pretty effortless
4. Native ssh means I don't have to use putty? ()

Cons:

1. No native support for codecs
2. Windows don't pre-empt each other well (sometimes get stuck behind)
3. Minimizing sends a window away completely to be lost somewhere in the "Activities" section
4. Native handling of multi-monitor taskbar is pretty nonexistent (?)

I'll call it a draw so far - overall rating, 3.5/5 - I'm not overwhelmed but I'm not suicidal while using it.**

* I know, I know - I could use some other Desktop environment. But I shouldn't have to work to do so. At the least, I should have the option right up there glaring at me during setup:

1) Use Gnome 3 and want to murder Fedora devs
2) Use Gnome Classic and live with the old tech

** This is an opinion, not a technical review It's based only on my experiences and my particular needs. In before OMGWTFN00b and so forth.