Fedora Core 2: Works for me
Many people are bashing Fedora Core
2 (the newest bastard stepchild of Red Hat
9)
for having some pretty grievous errors for a full release.
As was the case with Windows ME (hey, it worked great when it didn't break! In fact, it's still running perfectly on some older machines under my watch) I'm going to go against the majority here and sing the praises of this little "community" effort.
When Red Hat woke up and realized the community was doing a better job that it was of keeping up with it's packages and testing new stuff, they got smart and let them do it officially. Of course they took their name off the front, but all their money and hopes are behind the effort, and they're still pretty much running the show.
The Fedora team who was merged in to provide package maintenance is doing an OK job, but no one group can package and maintain everything, and you still need to go to outside vendors to get what you need.
The first thing I do when I get done installing Fedora Core is to install the ATRpms Kickstart package. It sets up everything so that I can get new programs and updates not only from Red Hat and Fedora, but also from ATRpms. FreshRPMS, and more.
There are tons of great projects that aren't "official" fedora stuff, including most importantly for me, the Mythtv-suite package, which rolls all 59 packages and dependencies of MythTV into one easy to install bundle. Firefox, Sodipodi, and Thunderbird (hopefully coming soon to the third party repositories for FC2) are other great programs that aren't yet on Red Hat's radar.
Now that the repositories have had a chance to catch up with the new Fedora Core 2 and get their packages updated to match, FC2 is becoming a prime distro.
For me, just the inclusion of the 2.6 series kernel, the Xorg X11 server with VIA chipset support (full screen video on my EPIA M10000 (almost*) out of the box! Finally!)
*I say almost because you still have to hand edit /etc/X11/Xorg.conf to switch the display driver to "via", but at least you don't have to do crazy things like instally a binary kernel module or compile the new XF86 X-server yourself. At the moment, this should be the default distro for anyone running MythTV on a Via EPIA board. It's got support for the Via graphics chipset, perfect Alsa sound, and a super-simple apt-based install of the newest MythTV.
All in all, it's a great release for me. I'd say, as long as you're not dual booting, give it a shot if just for the 2.6 kernel and alsa. Oh, and switch your default desktop to KDE with
