Fedora?

So I’m putting Linux on my mom’s computer.  There are tons of reasons to NOT use Windows, and literally just a couple in its favor (Quicken, TurboTax), which Crossover Office will solve on Linux anyway, for $50 or so.

I figured I’d install Fedora, because 1) it’s supposed to be an easy desktop distro, and 2) it’s really popular so I’d like to learn it.  I run Gentoo on my box, and of course I know that inside out, but wanted to install the "easy" distro for my mom/sister to use.

But so far, Fedora is anything but easy.  The default kernel doesn’t support firewire nor NTFS, so I couldn’t copy mom’s data from Windows without recompiling the kernel.  Red Hat has removed the MP3 support from XMMS due to "patent issues" so I had to manually find and download the MP3 plugin for an MP3 player... ridiculous.

The GUI-based printer setup is ridiculous.  The driver options are all obscure and meaningless (no "Epson", "HP", etc).  If you click on something like "PCL 5e" you get a sub-menu with some hplj drivers, but my printer is an Epson.  There’s an Epson driver under "Dot Matrix" but this is 2004... my printer isn’t dot-matrix.

The search-from-URL in Mozilla just plain doesn’t work, for no good reason.  It works fine on Gentoo, fine on WinXP, but on Fedora it says "The URL is invalid and cannot be loaded."  No kidding fool, it’s not a URL, you’re supposed to *search* for it.  Ugh...

And yum is a nightmare.  It’s slow as crap, and almost every time I run it, one of the initial ~10 servers it tries to contact times out.  Instead of being sensible and moving right along, yum waits for 3 minutes.  For.  Each.  Freaking.  One.  And then, if I want to, say, "yum search thunderbird," it insists on first looking for updated packages for ALL THE PACKAGES on my system.  Yeah, that’s brilliant.  I really want that to happen every time I want to just search for one package.

I think I’m going to end up just putting Gentoo on here after all.  It’s not all bubbly like RedHat/Fedora but at least it’s logical and it works... and at this point, it’s definitely easier to use than Fedora.  Maybe in a year or two Fedora will mature and be reasonable.