Fedora 16 review - James Japan

November 9: After getting sick of Gnome 3 on Fedora 15, I tried Linux Mint Debian for a while because it has the Gnome 2 desktop environment, my favourite to date. Linux Mint Debian ran very well but because there were certain tweaks to the system I wanted to implement but could not (but can in Fedora), I decided to go back to Fedora 14, the last Fedora with Gnome 2. The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, preferred Gnome 2 over 3 as well. He also uses Fedora as his Linux distribution of choice. Since the advent of Gnome 3 in Fedora 15, Linus ditched it for the Xfce environment instead. I figure if Xfce is good enough for Linus, it’s good enough for me. So when Fedora 16 went gold yesterday, I immediately downloaded it, installed it, and installed the Xfce desktop environment.

Fedora 16 with Xfce, James Japan Desktop

James Japan's Xfce desktop with Fedora 16

Fedora 16 with the Xfce desktop environment is like driving a new car with a more powerful engine but with different dashboard. I’m getting used to it. Xfce does seem to be more tweak-able than Gnome 2 was. I can see certain features that Gnome 2 didn’t have. But I still miss the cool Gnome 2 applets. Won’t somebody please bring them back?

March 14, 2012 update: I tried to install Compiz in LXDE but couldn’t make it work. All icons on panels would disappear every time I ran fusion-icon. I wondered how it would work on KDE Plasma Desktop Environment. Compiz works great! Here’s what my desktop looks like now:

Kde Plasma James Japan Desktop

KDE Plasma has 4 different appearances

1. Desktop Icons (Plain desktop with icons on it)
2. Photos Activity (Shows random photos in the Picture folder)
3. Desktop (Makes the Desktop folder a window with the option of wallpaper)
4. Search and Launch (Shows all the installed applications)

Besides this it has a pop-up application menu that is overall better than either LXDE or XFCE, and way better than Gnome 3! All in all KDE Plasma seems to be for me the most user friendly, intuitive, easy to use and tweak-able Linux desktop environment.