Fedora 7: GUI ignorance?
Fedora 7 is out, and I've upgraded. The upgrade was mostly unspectacular.
I use KDE as my desktop environment these days, but a number of critical applications (Firefox, Amaya, OpenOffice, gaim^Wpidgin) use gtk. It took a bit of magical fiddling with font settings to get GTK applications to use the right fonts again. When all seemed well, OpenOffice had a nasty surprise (freedesktop.org bug #4650; fedora bug report #232159) for me: The interaction with gtk-qt-engine is broken enough that the software becomes essentially unusable. I'm somewhat bewildered that this seems not to be treated as a priority by the Fedora folks: OpenOffice is, for all intents and purposes, an absolutely critical piece of application software that simply must run flawlessly on any Linux system today that claims it's targeting the desktop.
I'm now back to using GTK applications with a native GTK theme that looks similar enough to the KDE environment I'm in. Still, these two bugs alone may very well be enough to make ordinary desktop users switch to other distributions, or systems.
Meanwhile, gaim is now Pidgin; with the change in name comes a change to an amazingly ugly icon theme -- yes, even geeks like their desktop pretty!
Edited, later: They've done it again -- suspend/resume needs more manual fixing. This time, the bluetooth subsystem leads the kernel to lock up upon suspend. Fortunately, this is fixed by a simple /sbin/service bluetooth stop in the suspend script. Still...
