Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Since switching my Linux machine from Gentoo to Fedora Core 3, I’ve noticed:

1. Font anti-aliasing is much better. I can’t make a fair comparison to Mac OS X since my iMac is of the LCD variety while my Linux machine has a ViewSonic 17PS CRT.
2. Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, can now reliably browse Samba shares. It’s much slower than Konqueror (the KDE file manager/browser/kitchen sink), but it works.
3. GNOME no longer crashes the X server after about a half hour of inactivity. That one got really annoying.
4. Nearly everything feels faster, despite one of the supposed benefits of Gentoo being that, because everything is built using custom compiler settings, you end up with a finely tuned system.

The few things I dislike about the default Fedora Core setup:

1. BlueCurve is ugly. Switching to the default GNOME look is easy, with KDE only being complicated when it comes to the K Menu (think Windows Start menu), which required going through and choosing the default KDE icons for the different menu categories (Internet, Office, etc.).
2. The BlueCurved OpenOffice is functionally acceptable, but I really prefer the Ximianized version that fits much better with the default GNOME appearance.
3. The ability to shut down cleanly broke between FC2 and 3. A search of the Fedora forums showed that this is a problem for a number of people.

In other news, WordPress 1.3 looks like it will be a nice release (I’m running alpha 5).