Recently Fedora 18 has been released. As always I’m about the first to upgrade my laptop to the latest version to experience the improvements.
This time though, it’s an incredible LET DOWN. I even consider moving away from Fedora because of this last desvelopment. Being an advanced Linux user I’m familiar with running Fedora, having to fix things and using workarounds because software is new and not fully developped. But this time it’s going too far and turning my machine in a nightmare.
In short, I’ll just sum up the frustrations with this new release:
- Screensaver. Lots of times, when unlocking screensaver, it remains a grey screen, for me to have to pres Alt-F2 and run ‘r’, to restart the shell. It just doesn’t show the desktop.
- My mouse wheel stopped working for the one mouse (A vertical mouse by Evoluent). luckily the simple HP mouse wheel still works, but it’s crap that a mouse that has always worked JUST stops working properly
- When I have to switch to a text terminal (eg Ctrl-Alt-F2), I can’t switch back, coz the screen starts to flicker and the systems becomes unresponsive, no SSH access anymore either
- When booting up, my harddisk is luks encrypted and asks for the passphrase. Since the upgrade, this phase TIMES OUT and I have to reboot to get further. WTF, why can’t the passphrase box be there for eternity, for me to enter it when I get back from wherever I went to, just to continue the boot process?
- The add/remove software application DISAPPEARED. I had to change a .desktop file to show it again. Why would they want to prevent me from adding/removing software from the gui?
- Online accounts – Google sync doesn’t work anymore with two-factor authentication. I have to manually change the setting with the keyring manager to get it to work (workaround). Why did it work on F17, but no longer? that’s weird
- I have decided to disable the online accounts in total because it’s buggy, I have to log in to facebook every time again.
- While removing all online accounts, it appears that the msn account is still active (I receive chat messages) while the list of accounts is empty
- The blueman package crashes at EVERY startup, and a bug report has been there for ages, but still not resolved.
- The gnome desktop comes up with sound muted at every login
Okay, quite a list already. If there are more things that pop my mind, I’ll definitely add them to the list. For now, I feel it is counter productive to have F18 on a laptop.