I know I’m going to get some flak for this from our Fedora listeners, but I can’t restrain myself.
I downloaded the Fedora Live CD (KDE edition) to give it a whirl. Yes, I admit that I bundled three things I don’t particularly care for into one download (Fedora, KDE, and KDE 4), so you could argue I’m setting this micro review up for failure. (Miraculously, I was not intoxicated at the time, although I have been feeling under the weather for the last couple of days, so that may have been a contributing factor.) Anyway, I fired up a new VMWare machine, and booted from the Live CD ISO. After a few standard boot messages, I was greeted with the following image.
*sigh* Off to a great start here.
I acknowledged that error and submitted the bug report, and moved on, accepting the defaults (DHCP, partition the drive). I did not encrypted the partition, but did appreciate having the option presented to me in the GUI setup, as opposed to having to download an alternate install CD, a la Ubuntu. Curiously, when I first booted, the clock was right, but after identifying myself as being in America/New York, it jumped back 4 hours. Other than that, the install was smooth and took only a few minutes.
Observation: Is it just me, or is KDE 4 trying (too hard) to be just like Windows Vista? I really do not care for Vista’s graphical overhaul, and it seems that KDE 4’s trying to do the same thing with the application launcher/start menu thing, desktop widgets, etc.
Whoops! I’m not done yet! After rebooting, I was prompted to continue the setup. That’s a little confusing. I thought setup was done when I was prompted to reboot, but it’s continuing now. How very Windows-like.
Another annoyance is that the mouse cursor is not tracking properly in my virtual machine, and I have two cursors, pretty much forcing me to use the keyboard to navigate the GUI installer. (This isn’t the end of the world, but Ubuntu handles this properly as of Hardy now.)
So, at the “Create an account” page, I clicked (sorry, tabbed over to and pressed “Enter” on) the “Network Login” button, thinking I would try authenticating against my Active Directory controller. (Note that if this works, it’s a point over Ubuntu, as I have not yet gotten Likewise to authenticate against my Windows boxes on Hardy yet.) Surprisingly, I was presented with a login screen which welcomed me to localhost.localdomain. Uhm… okay… what happened to my network login? I’m pretty sure there was more to the setup that I was not prompted to.
Okay, my tolerance for this is rapidly waning and it’s really nice outside, so maybe I’ll download a GNOME Live CD and try that out later, but I think I’m going to bail on Fedora 9 KDE for now.
Note: I do like the artwork.