Today I'm installing FC4, under VMWare Workstation 5 on my ThinkPad T42. Wish me luck :-) I'll update this post with my experience. If you have any suggestions or commentary on FC4, please share it here.
Install was mostly painless (I still don't understand why after requesting my location and language about half a dozen times, the installer still presents the initial clock configuration in 24-hour time.)
Installing VMWare Tools required I grab the kernel sources which don't seem to be included in the default packages any more. Not a huge deal. (I think this was also the case with FC3 but it's been a while since I set that up so I don't remember.)
The theme improvement is nice. I like the buttons and window decoration. The overall feel of GUI is a bit crisper than previous releases.
This "Stretch icon" feature might be nice if the icons didn't look like total crap scaled up beyond their basic size. Are we expecting SVG icons soon, or maybe some higher-res icons at least?
I'm not terribly fond of the default menus at the top of the desktop. First, why are we still including more than a dozen games right up at the top level of the menus like that, most of which will probably never be used by most of the product's users, ever.
The Places menu seems mostly reasonable but this Desktop menu is just awful. Not one item on that menu has anything to do with "Desktop". Why on earth is the menu named that. Also, what the heck is the distinction between Preferences and System Settings. With every release I anticipate this mess being cleaned up and with every release I'm disappointed. What makes "Sound" and "Preferred Applications" preferences while "Display" and "Root Password" are system settings? And why does all of this have to be exposed in primary menus like this. Are we really running the "Soundcard Detection" applet so regularly that it deserves to sit in these menus? The Gnome and Fedora camps could both take a lesson from Firefox here.
The GUI feels pretty responsive (though I've given FC4 just over a GB of RAM to play with and VMWare 5 maybe also just be that much better than VMWare 4.5 (another recent upgrade).
I also think it's a bit uncool that in the default panel launchers, we (Firefox) get called "Web Browser" while Open Office's Writer gets called "OpenOffice.org Writer" - but that's a minor nit.
I'll probably have more as I dig further in.
update: unfortunately, as with FC3, the mozilla.org Firefox builds do not run on this system because, in their infinite wisdom, the FC team stopped shipping libstdc++.so.5. I can't imagine this is a space issue given all the other garbage that's installed in the default packages.
Oh, nice, I can't even get it from the Legacy Software Development package group any more because while that includes -296, it doesn't include -33 (though it's easily harvested from the DVD or disk 3) Jeeze.
update2: I know that some of these issues are app issues, some are Gnome issues, and some are Fedora issues, but that's immaterial. If the Linux desktop is going to be successful with Regular People (who don't make the distinction between the parts that are Fedora and the parts that are Gnome) then things like a painful set of menus need to be corrected. If Gnome doesn't do it, then Fedora needs to. If Fedora doesn't do it, then some other distro will.
