Experience with FC5 - what's your take?

[Dan]

Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
> Hell Everyone,
>
> I want to make the switch to FC5, but I keep seeing messages from people
> about problems with FC5.  It could just be me, but the frequency seems
> to be a lot higher than when FC4 came out.
>   
Seems that way to me too; FC4 was a very stable release in the Fedora world.
> At the moment I have a perfectly working FC4 system.  The only hangup is
> that my laptop doesn't suspend/resume, but then again, I haven't tried
> very hard to get it working. Still, I'm happy with FC4.
>   
Suspend/resume and hibernate works about 95% perfectly for me in FC5.
> I'd call myself a very well experienced Linux user.  I'm confident I
> could iron out most any problems associated with doing the upgrade.
> But, I'm still hesitant.  So, can anyone convince me otherwise?  What's
> been your experience with FC5 so far?  Were you able to wipe everything
> and just keep /home intact (in the past I've had very wierd things
> happen when I've done this, so I've had to do selective restores when
> upgrading)?  Any issues that you just can't get rid of?  
I don't remember how I brought my /home directory to the new install, 
but it wasn't a separate partition and now it is...but I havent had any 
issues because i have a /home from FC4.
As far as issues I can't get rid of, there's really just one for me 
right now; if I boot FC5 with the power cord plugged in, the wireless 
interface isn't routed. Minor issue and easy workaround (reboot without 
the power plugged :P) but very strange. I should probably look to see if 
there are any bug reports about it.
Another few don't have to do directly with FC5; there was the inability 
of the initally-released FC5 kernel to use non-GPL modules, but that's 
resolved with any newer kernel. Then, there's kernel 2.6.16 (all FC5 
kernels but the initial one) which currently will not let dmraid enable 
(for fakeraid setups like my desktop); there's a bug for that. And 
NetworkManager seems to have problems with certain wireless cards, but 
my ipw2200 works fine with it. The new NetworkManager-vpnc module in FC5 
is _very_ helpful to me though, for a campus Cisco VPN.
Then there's the trivial issues, such as the lack of a terminal launcher 
in the right-click menu; I agree, it's pointless to remove it from the 
menu, and the nautilus-open-terminal package should put it back at its 
original place rather than the middle; but it's easy enough to drag it 
from Applications->Accessories to the panel or desktop. Some other even 
more trivial issues I'm sure, but I can't recall them right now.
One more thing, I'm not sure if it's a problem with the driver (the 
livna ATI one), but doom 3 won't start for me (it worked in FC4 with the 
livna driver). I haven't tried any other 3D-accelerated programs, and 
it's giving the most ambiguous error message possible, so I don't really 
know. I'd try it on my desktop with nvidia to see if it's 
driver-specific but..the dmraid issue is keeping me from getting a 
kernel that will allow the module. Eh, such is life.
> Has FC5 been
> stable?  
Extremely. I don't recall it crashing for me yet (except once but that 
was my fault).
> VMware Workstation running okay (I know about the patches)?
>   
Nothing I can contribute on that topic, sorry.

Basically, FC5 has a ton more features than FC4, and so it has a ton 
more bugs. I tend to go with the buggy rather than the featureless (but 
not so much as to delve into rawhide :) ).
-Dan
> Regards,
>
> Ranbir
>