As Mark Shuttleworth announcements are sometimes cryptic, I put together what follows:
All considered the new codename is quite cool.
So, when your school mates will deride you just because you have a J* J* in your computer, stay cool: in 6 months you’ll be using the coolest and sexiest distribution around*!
* by the way you have summer holydays in the middle, and you can jump in the first alpha in september. So actually you have been quite lucky this time.
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Fedora completely blows Ubuntu away in terms of features and default look. Who needs Karmic???
Karmic may be a reason for me to (temporary?) switch to fedora. I installed the karmic alpha but.. nothing, abosolutely nothing has changed, at least not for me.
I know there’s a lot new packages but I didn’t notice the difference.
Lets see what Fedora is offering for the next release..
It’s amazing how much people get spoiled once they switch to open source software, they become so accustomed to having “ZOMG HAWT NEW FEATURES” that they’re incapable of accepting an uneventful release that just improves on what we already have instead of making yet more drastic changes. Also, historically the alphas have never been much different, everything is still under development and they’re still working on getting packages stable, you’ll notice most of the changes towards the end of the development cycle.
How can you say Fedora blows Ubuntu away in terms of features? Most of the time I hear or read “X is way better than Y” or “A has better features than B” it’s either been because the person has never used the alternative to its full extent/intended purpose, or it’s a marketing scam in which a competitor rips into a new product on a blog, then promotes their own alternative!
I used Red Hat 5-Red Hat 9, then switched to Fedora Core which I used for a couple of years until I found Debian then Ubuntu – and I haven’t looked back. Yum was too damned slow, and RPM can be a nightmare (speaking from both an end-user AND a package maintainer’s perspective). Even being completely unfamiliar with Debian concepts, I didn’t even have to learn the package management tool because it’s intuitive and works out-of-the-box. And yes, I know, I know Yum works out of the box too, but it’s taken it a while to reach the same level of maturity as dpkg/apt.
I’ve installed the latest beta last week, most noticeable improvement so far is the boot time. And I don’t want to start another debate about “who turns their computer off these days?” – because I use a laptop with battery at 20% of its capacity (which Ubuntu told me about =] ) and startup times are important. And even though Karmic doesn’t have a crap-load of new stuff (yet), the behind-the-scenes work on the operating system – which most of the time doesn’t get what it deserves in terms of appreciation – not every release can be glitz & glamor; look at Windows 7 for example; bugger all has changed but at least now the bloody thing is finished!
And for the record, I do use RHEL, Fedora, CentOS & Ubuntu to their full extent as I develop on them every day, on real hardware, not VMs, so I do have a very good idea on the capabilities and short-comings of every distribution.
As for the release of Karmic, it may not look much different than its predecessor – but in the end, DOES IT REALLY HAVE TO?
(by the way – Jauntys login screen > Karmic’s default one =])