[IOML] RedHat 8.0 - Impressions

[Dylan Smith]

All,

I've been running RH 8.0 since not long after it came out. Here are my
impressions of the latest version of the distro:

On the plus side, it's very polished. The controversy over KDE and Gnome
being made to look 'the same' is a tempest in a teacup - I think it
enhances the distro to have some consistency over KDE and Gnome apps. You
can now choose your favorites from either without getting an odd-looking
desktop. I tend to prefer KDE myself (nicer terminal, and I think
Konqueror rocks as a web-browser).

It's still not really a consumer level OS, although it's getting close. If
I was starting a new office, or thinking of upgrading an existing one from
old MS stuff (Win98 with older versions of Office), I'd be very happy
installing RH 8.0 and I'd be confident that users could cope quite
happily. The install is smooth, and RH seems great at picking up all the
common devices (importantly, printing, which Unixes have always been a bit
weak at. Printing on commodity hardware such as HP Deskjets trouble-free
is pretty important if you want to use something on the desktop). There
are some issues that require a knowledgable user - getting my GeForce 4
drivers installed required procedures that a typical non-technical Windows
user would have trouble with. Also, it didn't quite get my sound card
right - something I could fix myself easily, but a non-technical user
would be stuck on.

Of course, it's still a fabulous server OS. You still have the option of
running without any kind of GUI at all, and with careful selection of
install packages, you can easily configure a reasonably lightweight
install for servers.

Things that they got wrong - if you've ever done any serious study of UI
design, you may have come across Schneiderman's 8 Golden Rules of user
interface design. RH 8.0 breaks one of these badly - it does not give any
sort of effective feedback on application launching. I'm seeing how my Dad
(who is very much non-technical if it's not a motorbike) copes with RH8.0,
and the lack of feedback when launching applications has meant he's been
manically double-clicking on icons thinking the app's not launching, and
then suddenly getting about 7 instances of a window (usually the
web-browser) showing up. This can be fixed by switching to KDE and
enabling launch feedback (on RH 7.3, launch feedback was on by default!)
so RedHat have definitely regressed here since RH 7.3.  I think this is
very important, especially for non-technical users who won't know where
to go or what to do to switch launch feedback on.

This is the first RH distro to come with OpenOffice, and I'm impressed. It
doesn't quite launch as fast as MS Office (but then again, MS Office loads
a big chunk of itself into memory when you boot a Windows system with it
on) but it has all the features I need. If someone emails you a Word .doc
file, OO will open it, and for the vast majority of .doc files, format it
correctly. You can also save as Word .doc if you need to send a file to a
MS Office user. OO's native format is XML based, which has nice scripting
possibilities.

One thing to watch out for - XMMS in this distro is unable to play .mp3
files out of the box (RH removed .mp3 due to patent issues). This is easy
enough to fix by going to xmms.org and getting the rpm with .mp3 support.
Again, this will stump a non-technical user.

In summary - strong as always on the server end, and now a real contender
on the desktop end. Easy to install, good device support, but they still
need to do some work!

-- 
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man      | Code fast, crash young and
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net         | leave a beautiful core.
FFE/Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net |             -- JK (#afe)