[cumbria_lug] Initial Red Hat 9 impressions... (2nd attempt)

[Michael Saunders]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Schwuk wrote:

> Been running since it was released. It's my favourite desktop distro
> (but not the one I would recommend to people - that's Mandrake 9.1)

Funnily enough, in my distro-fiddling mood I installed Mandrake 9.1 as
well yesterday -- all the usual frills and goodies, but still seems
slightly lacking in the QA front (OO.o won't start at all right from a
fresh install and the DrakConf tools are glitchy). But yeah, I'd push
that it to newbies too.

> They are actaully extending the ncurses alternatives - there's more
> in 9 than 8.0.

Indeed, this is always a Good Thing(tm). Additionally, I'm also glad
RH haven't tied their graphical PyGTK tools too deeply into their
GNOME setup, and they work without hassle on other desktops/WMs.

> Yes, but the run level editor is very easy to use.

Indeed it is, but for a newcomer the concept of "runlevels" and
"services" is somewhat alien -- the stock RH 9 bootup time can be
almost halved without any loss of desktop functionality, which gives a
nicer impression.

> > # Every single RPM has been built with debug symbols enabled!
> 
> Never noticed any 'sluggy' performance...

Well, you won't until you rebuild all the packages! Just checking out
Mandrake, they use -march=586 and omit-frame-pointer, and everything's
stripped, and it certainly feels a great deal more snappy and
responsive on the same hardware.

I'm gonna try and find some more info on RH's move here, because it
seems significantly wasteful. Debugging info, among other things,
increases the size of resulting binaries/libs, which also naturally
leads to fewer cache hits etc. Even though it doesn't make an
earth-shattering difference, just 10-15% overall performance gain is
well worth it; I've rebuilt all sorts of stuff with -O3, omit-fp etc.  
and had no problems at all. The Gentoo crowd go mad with optimisations
and feed problems upstream, so there's no excuse for a mainstream
distro to be right at the bottom end now...

> > # GNOME 2.2 is polished and slick, but unfortunately, the more I
> > use of it, the more it seems poorly-executed.
> 
> I still can't 'get' KDE compared to Gnome, so I'm biased on this...
> Also, I change my Gnome to be more like the stock one than the
> Bluecurve version.

I don't dig KDE much either - IceWM forever! - but at least it's not
so patronising and lets users choose what they want, not what Havoc P
wants. Considering all the UI work done, it's amazing that such
elementary flaws are still present; as said, if Sun gets pissed off
with this and switches to KDE, well, that'd be a gigantic blow...

> :) - apart from that, she managed to navigate everyhting without a
> problem, and even said she preferred it to Windows. Result.

Heh, cool. Here's hoping they'll do a 9.1 to refine the distro, but
recent comments by RH staff give the impression that their free
version will be like a testing ground for new goodies, before they
make it into RHEL.

Personal Desktop could well be incredible, though.

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk