fedora 16
So... I installed Fedora 16 on the home desktop today, coming from Fedora 14. I am running it on an HP Pavilion Elite... I would tell you what kinda but they have garbage written all over the thing, just not the model! Suffice it to say, AMD 3core processor, 6GB RAM, and an nVidia vga+dvi video card with two Samsung 20' monitors attached. My first attempt to upgrade was to use the preupgrade feature. Ran the software, it said reboot, I did, and came right back to Fedora 14. Meh, it failed last time so no big suprise[1]... while the preupgrade software was running I burned the Fedora 16 install DVD. Booted to the installer, which was only on the vga feed monitor, and to big to see the buttons (yay for alt+b for back and alt+n for next). I went through the process telling it to upgrade my current Fedora 14 to 16. Post installation I could not get X running. I assume this was because on Fedora 14 I was using the RPMFusion packaged nvidia drivers. At this point I sighed and remembered why I have always believed in the concept of fresh installs. And why not this time? There is btrfs, new userids, the new systemd, and Gnome 3.2. Why wouldn't I want a clean slate?
So I rebooted to the installer. Oddly enough this time the installer display "worked". I could see everything, it was just spanned over both screens which for an installer is more annoying than helpful, BUT it was better than the first install so.. moving on. Was able to easily add my wireless network during the install to grab updates at install time, which is great. Post install we come to the Firstboot screen, which unfortunately suffered from some screen freakiness, it was skinny and too tall for the monitor. You can select Forward using alt+f easily enough, unless you want to provide smolt data, that requires a few trial and error tab and spaces. A short time after starting I was presented with the new and prettier GDM login prompt. I logged in and was presented with... pretty much nothing. But that is the point, right? So there is a small non-descript panel across the top with Activities, the date, a few icons and my name. I had heard that Gnome 3.2 has Online Account integration, so I clicked on my name in the top right corner and clicked on Online Accounts. I added my Google account, which is the only type it supports currently, and... well nothing happened, at least not noticeably. So I went and read about Online Account integration. It says Contacts are integrated, so I clicked on Activities and typed a contact name in, and voila, there it was. It says Calendar is integrated, so I clicked on the date in the top panel. My calendar was not there, so I clicked Open Calendar. Evolution Calendar popped up and it had my Google calendars in it. I checked the boxes and was prompted for my password, I provided it, and my calendar integrated with the top panel. Yay. It says Documents are integrated, and ya well, I never figured that one out.
So I did a couple of quick normal behaviors. I added HotSSH, which is an amazing SSH GUI for Linux; added RPMFusion, added the printer (even easier than last time, ridiculously so) and created the wifey's account. At which point I decided to try to add "profile icons" to our local accounts. So first I have to say that it is silly to integrate Online Accounts and not just use my associated profile picture from that account, or let me choose which account's picture to use. Second, IT DOES NOT WORK. I tried clicking on the blank icon and selecting an existing image to scale down, nothing happened. I tried making a smaller image and selecting that, nothing. I googled how to set it and found the 'manual' way, nothing. I found a more specific manual way, nothing. I rebooted just to verify, still nothing. I even tried using one of their icons, still nothing!! So that is very annoying.
Aside from an occasional sluggishness, which I am currently (and perhaps naively) attributing to the nouveau driver, its pretty good. Before this I have been using Gnome 3 a bit on my laptop, so I am not completely thrown off or anything. I only have primary two complaints with Gnome 3 is the Alt+Tab behavior. And its not that I don't like how they tried to improve it, and their concept is decent. But there is one significant flaw. A quick alt+tab single hit has historically always taken you back and forth between your current and last window, even if they were the same app. Now it appears that this functionality comes from Alt+Esc. Which is weird, and I only just now accidentally discovered while typing this complaint. I thought Alt+Esc was Activities, but that seems to be mapped to the Windows key, which is kewl. Maybe this complaint is now void. My second complaint is that I've always used the right click menu on the desktop to open terminals, and now I've got to do a new work flow. is that really a big deal? I guess not.
The real question now is, how will the wife take the change?
Update 1: I am sad to report, that HotSSH, while installable, does not work without installing an undefined dependancy, the 'vte' package. A bug was already filed.
Update 2: Got the Gnome profile images working. Still had to do it the more manual way of placing the image as /var/lib/AccountServices/icons/${userid} and adding the "Icon=/var/lib/AccountServices/icons/${userid}" in /var/lib/AccountServices/users/${userid}. The problem was that the images were not tagged appropriately for SELinux. So a quick restorecon -R /var/lib/AccountServices and its fixed. However this does not explain why doing it the easy way through the GUI did not work.