I installed Fedora this evening, and I am absolutely in love with it. I downloaded it over BitTorrent over two days (yes, it is that slow) and popped it on an SD card, and then booted the Eee PC from it.
The first thing I noticed was that it is incredibly fast. Boot-up happens without Plymouth (modesetting support for Intel chips is still in development, and will probably appear when it gets merged into the mainline kernel) but still uses a nice little ASCII boot screen. It’s fast - I haven’t timed it yet, but it’s speedier than Ubuntu.
It boots into GNOME 2.24 (through a brilliant implementation of GDM) starting X in less than three seconds. And - perhaps most surprisingly - everything on the Eee PC worked out of the box. WLAN, Ethernet, display, compositing, touchpad, webcam, everything. When Ubuntu’s traditionally been better in this respect, I’m thoroughly impressed that everything works out of the box in this release.
The only immediate problem I’m having at the moment is the fact that because my Internet connection’s been quite slow lately, downloading OpenOffice.org and LaTeX is taking a lot of time. It’s been going for hours now… and will keep on going for a lot longer.
Another issue I have with Fedora is the fact that a superuser password is required. I’m aware this is the norm on Unix systems, but I would like a simple (GUI) system whereby it could switch to an Ubuntu-style system (i.e. root login disabled, first user added to /etc/sudoers). Aside from these gripes, however, Fedora is incredibly solid. I’ll be using it on the Eee PC for the forseeable future from now on: I still think Ubuntu is a great OS, but for now, it’ll be Fedora on my main Linux box.
