Monday, June 13, 2011

Switching to XFCE for F15

I've begun the process of upgrading my home machines to Fedora 15. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to switch to XFCE. The new Gnome 3 Shell is pretty horrendous on my wife's D820 laptop. The opensource nouveau drivers aren't good enough to run it. It's not only the lack of speed but how they seem to have gone out of their way to make it not easy to use. The one thing that sticks out is the lack of a shutdown button. If you want to shutdown the computer, you have to hold down the ALT key while hovering over the suspend or log out and hit shutdown. Here's a bug report for the lack of shutdown and resulting conversation.

I've not tried my work laptop yet. While it's docked it will crash when I try to suspend using the Nvidia closed driver. I'll try the nouveau driver under F15 eventually. If it fails like it did under F14, the suspend only button is totally unsatisfactory.

Prior to release, the buzz was that Gnome 3 was going to avoid the problems that accompanied the transition to KDE 4. It looks like the transition to Gnome 3 will be just as bad. I imagine that XFCE's user base will grow immensely now.

Fedora 15 is the most disappointed that I've been in a while with Fedora.