FC5 (lack of) quality

[Marius Andreiana]

Greetings,

I've installed FC5 in the same week it was released (as usual), after
using FC5test on one of my systems. After almost a month I'd like to
share my impressions, not as a rant, but as sign of warning regarding
release quality. 

There are a lot of regressions from FC4. First, the replicable ones:
* webdav in nautilus is very slow, unusable for daily usage (made bug,
no reply)
* TV tuner no longer working (made bug, seems like udev issue after some
research, no reply)
* totem subtitles no longer work properly (lots of "???" instead of
letters)
* on a 256mb RAM system GNOME it's hardly usable due to swapping with
more than 2 applications opened (firefox and another small one, no ooo).
Only minimal services (network, xfs..) are started automatically.

These wouldn't have been much of a problem, but there are also several
un-replicable issues:
* window borders disappear sometimes and then all GNOME freezes. It's
possible to go to console with alt+Fn and kill some processes, but no
effect. X must be killed and restarted.
* once any application trying to output sound (including play on command
line) hanged (must use kill -9). Rebooting fixed it.
* starting udev gives sometimes "wait timeout. Switching to background
[failed]". Due to this, network start failed and bluetooth hanged.
Rebooting fixed it.
* mplayer complains sometimes that XVideo can't be opened. I know
mplayer isn't part of fedora, but the problem is with X. Restarting X
makes it work.

To conclude, there are many issues impacting user productivity and also
a worrying trend "reboot and it should work" (sounds familiar?) I know
Fedora is very fast moving and we should expect bugs, but the FC5
release feels like rawhide. Is this intended and daily users should
better look to RHEL? (Lack of Fedora Extras for RHEL prevents me to
switch right now, the licensing it's not an issue)

Do you have any advices for developers? I don't see any real-world
solutions (unlike "developers should be more careful when writing code"
or make test cases for every function with every use case possible), but
still, the number of bugs is growing.

Anyway, thanks for FC5 and the important technical developments which
were included :)

-- 
Marius Andreiana