My issues with Fedora 16

After testing the beta of Fedora 16 a while I decided to do a fresh install of F16 on my laptop instead of simply updating everything because I wanted to keep it ‘clean’. It is my experience that bugs from the alpha or beta versions can spill over into the stable version if you update to that. This in turn would make reporting bugs more difficult because you might encounter bugs which might not have occurred if you would have done a clean installation instead. The extent to which it can make a system dysfunctional is illustrated well by the Kubuntu 11.10 installation on my main PC for production use, I was inpatient while 10.10 was still in alpha status and upgraded months before the stable version of 10.10 saw the light of day. As a consequence Plasma throws error messages when I want to shut down my PC more often than not. These error messages prevent the execution of the shutdown, so every time I shut down I have to watch and verify it gets turned off, or else click the ‘OK’ buttons on the error messages to make them go away.

That aside, the fresh installation of F16 gave me a motivation to get bug hunting and reporting. It seems that F16 is plagued by some minor but very annoying issues which are easy to notice, which makes me wonder how the issues were not noticed by Fedora’s QA. And Epiphany is still not usable as an alternative to Firefox, which is a pity considering all the good work that has gone into it. I’m not very confident in the developer’s attention for bugs because a bug report I filed a few months ago during the alpha stage of F16 about the corruption of the Yum database (doesn’t occur anymore) was never even triaged. Yes, that happens often with some other free software projects too, but it still bothers me. One more thing I don’t get is why they can’t fit LibreOffice on their GNOME Live CD, if Ubuntu can do it why not Fedora?

  • Bug #757487: the grub menu shows up even if Fedora is the only OS which is present, which is unnecessary.
  • Bug #732058: after pulling in a new kernel through the updates, grub kept booting the old kernel which came with the installation.
  • Bug #742584: a minor feature request because it would make more sense to encrypt the entire system, but it would be nice if the /home partition could be decrypted when the user logs in. I.e. without an extra passphrase if that’s the only encrypted partition, which is how Ubuntu does it AFAIK.
  • Bug #742584: the Java plugin doesn’t work with Epiphany.
  • Bug #664285: thanks to Adobe the Flash plugin doesn’t work in Epiphany because they haven’t ported it to GTK+3 yet.
  • Bug #664915: Epiphany uses wrong fonts to display websites, but I’m not sure if this is a bug in Epiphany or in Fedora.
  • Bug #638117: I constantly have to turn off the Bluetooth hardware in my notebook because it’s enabled by default as soon as I log in to F16, unlike other distributions I’ve used on my notebook.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top