I’ve downloaded Fedora 9 Gnome and KDE4. The Gnome version is boring, but it works fine. The KDE4 version is brilliant. I must say that I’ve always been using Gnome, but KDE4 is really good. It looks much more modern then Gnome and the features (plasmoids for example) are much more up to date.

But then, I was testing Fedora.

With linux I run into my laziness. Windows is easy: you buy a laptop, boot it, it works. That simple. But then you have a system based on crap technology and you very little customizing possibilities and I like customizing… I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it worked perfect from the beginning, nearly all my hardware was supported, or I could get it to work. With Fedora not everything works, and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work to get it to work.

The fn-keys don’t work. This is a common problem with the Sony laptops. Ubuntu solved this, Fedora didn’t. That sucks. I’m not able to set the brightness in Fedora, this bothers me because the display of the Sony is very bright. In Ubuntu it does work.

Frankly that did it for me. I like customizing, but I don’t want to search the web and find that stuff as trivial as the support of brightness is not supported in an OS.

On the positive side I must say that the KDE4 is really, really good. It’s much better then Gnome. Everything from the looks until the functionality is just a step better. But it’s not finished. When I see the prereleases of KDE4 I see that they are moving in the right direction, but they are just not there yet.

I’ll stay with Ubuntu for a while, but with the 9 release Fedora really made a huge step towards the usability for the general user.

BTW. I’ve also taken a look at Kubuntu. That looks rather pale when compared to Fedora. I understand that Ubuntu didn’t want to take KDE4 into the LTS verison, but KDE3.5 is real crap. It’s completely outdated.