Fedora 16 has been released as of, I think, yesterday. I’d give it a mixed review, if not downright negative.
I upgraded my Fedora 14 system in the office to 16 yesterday using preupgrade. The upgrade went relatively smoothly — thought for some unfathomable reason, it didn’t bother to install the new kernel. The result was a system that took forever to do anything, was running the cooling fans flat out, and failed miserably to give me a working desktop. once I noticed it was still running a 2.x.fc14 kernel, I had to reboot in single user mode, install the new kernel and fix grub.conf.
The biggest loser here is Gnome3. While it’s visually kind of nice on the surface, it seems a lot of change simply for the sake of change… and none of it good. It’s actually much less convenient and less easy to use than Gnome2. For example, I no longer have the drop-down menu structure for starting apps. Now there’s an “Activities” link in the top right corner. Any time I want to start a new application, I click that — and it rearranges my desktop, shrinking my running windows down to tile them on screen, while popping up a short bar of frequently used apps. Or, I can click another word on the screen and see ALL of my apps, all at once, alphabetized. No grouping, of course. Oh – wait! There are the groups, clear the hell on the right edge of the screen. Why? Did we move to Iraq or something? Left to right, folks. It’s almost as if they want to make Linux look like an iPhone or Android, which works OK (kind of) on a phone sized screen but definitely not on a 1600×900 monitor.
Gone are the admin Settings menus. How do I set video card resolution and color depth? Beats the hell out of me. Apparently it doesn’t want to let me log in as root now, either…  a choice that has always been MINE to make, not someone else’s. I had to do a Google search, then edit two files to get that back. My bottom screen bar is gone; minimizing windows makes them disappear completely, and you have to go through the stupid application click dance to see them. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I’m hoping they haven’t irreparably broken the “fallback mode”. I’m switching to it. Gnome3 is a loser in so many ways I’m not wasting any more time with it.