I am a Redhat Certified Technician (RHCT),  so naturally I do like the Fedora distributions. The last couple Fedora releases have little bit of a let down, slow and buggy. This caused me to convert over to Ubuntu which I am currently using (8.10). After my install of Fedora Core 10 in Part 1 of my review I had high hopes for this release of Fedora Core 10.

The first thing that struck me, just as in the install, was how nice everything looked. I did the static install and just took the settings that a newbie would use, which installed Gnome. The Gnome desktop looks great. The theme looks good and the colors seemed balanced. Other applications that I opened looked like they fit, and the themes were in-line with the total desktop “feel”.

As I started to use FC10 I noticed the speed has improved since the release of FC9. This is a good thing as FC9 was really a dog. I was running FC9 on the exact same hardware I am using for the FC10 review. I went through the software and there were really no surprises. FC10 comes with Gnome (2.24), OpenOffice.org (3.0.0), firefox (3.0.5), compiz (0.6.2), just to name a few.

All of my hardware was recognized and worked properly although the 3d effects on my Nvidia card were not enabled by default. As I used FC10 I could not help but notice the improvements that have been made throughout the distribution. Speed and ease of use really stick out in my mind as vast improvements in FC10. There are big improvements in the administration tools. The network manager and the printer manager are easy to use and work really well. Even a non Linux user will not be intimidated by the GUIs for these administration tools. Little improvements like theses make FC10 feel easier to use.

I have FC10 set up and browsing my shared files on my network quickly and easily. I was able to see my MP3 files and my movies on my files server. I moved over some OpenOffice documents and opened them without an issue in FC10.

One of the things that FC10 has boasted about is the PackageKit. FC10 now automatically advises you about what package you are missing trying to play a particular audio or video format. This is great since Fedora has always lacked native support for certain media types ie., mp3 and certain video codecs. So the first thing I did was move over a MP3 and clicked on it to play. Totem came up to play the MP3 and almost instantly the PackageKit came up telling me that I needed something to play this file.

Great just the way it was supposed to work, so I clicked search.

This process failed. No support for MP3s (without installing additional repositories). I repeated my test with a DVD.

This gave me the same result. No DVD support. PackageKit does not work as advertised. The Fedora team needs to work on this feature a little more. Now I do realize that you can get FC10 to support MP3s and DVDs by adding some repositories but this is something that FC10 needs to support without extra steps.

Overall this was a great release from the Fedora team. They have made great improvements on Fedora Core 10. I have even left the release on my machine to use it as one of my desktops. I was however disappointed with the lack of support for MP3 and DVDs out of the box. This is one of the things that is keeping FC10 from being the top Linux distribution.

Enjoy