FC5 Step Backwards: WAS: Mostly off topic, Evolution question

[karlp at ourldsfamily.com]

On Wed, April 26, 2006 10:47 am, Rick Stevens said:
> On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 12:52 +0200, Andrew Kelly wrote:
>> I have FC5 on a laptop, as well as the newest Ubuntu. I spent the last
>> half year or so using FC4 exclusively and was pretty much very pleased
>> with it all. FC5, however, seems nearly a step backwards and I'm not at
>> all sure I want to use it much longer. But I'd like to keep it through a
>> fair shakedown phase, maybe see if any coming updates brighten things
>> up. Parallel, though, I'd like to test drive Ubuntu as a potential
>> replacement. Right, nuff background.

snip

> What specific problems are you having with FC5?  I find it hard to
> believe you consider it a "step backward".  Beyond some upgrade issues
> with the installer, FC5 is pretty good.  There are a lot of inherent
> differences "under the hood" between it and FC4, so perhaps you're still
> trying to get used to those, but I'd hardly call it a step back.

I'm using it now and have found the enhancements are nice, like a gui
updater/software installer, etc. One major drawback may be easier to solve,
but it's a potential show-stopper: Gnome apps hang. I click on cancel, or OK
and sometimes it that window just stops responding. Along with it, the menu
bar at the top quits reacting. Sometimes it happens when I click on
Applications, or System, etc. on the menu bar and it stops working.
Gnome-terminal, if open, keeps working, but if I bring up a new window, it
stays black and never shows a command prompt.

The other show-stopper is Xorg itself. There's no option to probe a monitor
or video card with FC5, so I have to guess settings based on inadequate
manufacturer's docs. It also doesn't do Dual Head (another currently open
thread) which I've struggled with...

There's my 2 main complaints about FC5. Another minor one is that VMWare
Workstation won't compile. I've switched to VMWare Server Beta, and it
works, but I have to go through vmware-config.pl several times before it
'takes'. . .

The last issue I can think of (I'm really on a roll, aren't I?) is USB
usage. It works fine for my scanner; better than FC4 did actually, BUT Palm
still doesn't work at all. I've not tried KDE, which I actually got to work
ONCE with FC4... Enough yet? Stop...

Karl