I was using Fedora Core 15 and I installed all the updates and after booting up the machine again, I was not able to log in as the GDM package was not working at all. This is not a good advertisement for Fedora at all, this is an already reported bug in the GDM 3.0 package, I fixed this in a chroot by installing KDM then after booting up the system once again & logging into a Gnome 3 desktop, the gvfs package would not work and network manager would not connect any WIFI networks even though there were a few available, it would just not display them. This is the last straw, Linux is supposed to be more stable and secure than Windows, but with these bugs in a leading Linux distribution it does not give a good impression does it? I have downloaded the DVD ISO of Linux mint 11 x64 and I have installed it in place of Fedora Core 15 and it is working perfectly out of the box, with mp3 playback and Gnome 2.32 desktop all up and running without a hitch. If you install a Linux distribution to use as a desktop operating system, you expect a more reliable desktop experience than the Windows alternative and if you do not get that you feel you are let down. When a new distribution hits the download servers, it should be very reliable and configured very well to work first time and not break after one set of updates is installed. That is what happened to me in this instance. But the Debian based distributions that are very popular now are very reliable and easy to use, you just type sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and then all the extra codecs for Ubuntu are installed. this is simpler than the procedure for Fedora that is for sure. Linux Mint 11 came with mp3 playback by default, so I will not need to install so many codecs as compared to Ubuntu though.
I can not get DVD playback to work on Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Media Player complains about a missing DVD plugin, but I am not sure about how to get ahold of that and fix the problem, I just installed VLC and that fixed the DVD playback issue. Obviously I can just install the same program on Linux and get the same performance as Windows, Linux Mint is a very good operating system, I commend the Linux Mint 11 release for staying with Gnome 2.32 and not upgrading to Gnome 3.0 as that is quite demanding of graphics hardware and games like Darkplaces Quake do not run as well as they do on a Linux desktop without the Gnome 3.0 desktop installed. It has too much coding devoted to desktop effects and less to providing a good and fast desktop computing experience. The constant need to move the mouse cursor all the way across the screen and get to the activities menu and then all the way over the other side of the screen to get to the virtual desktops is very annoying to say the least. They need to radically re-think the design of the desktop to make it more usable and faster to navigate, Xfce is a better and faster desktop Window manager and does not give the same frustration when you are using it at all. Gnome 3 will not be a good advertisement for desktop Linux if it consumes desktop resources like the infamous Windows Vista used to.
The applications menu is slower to load than a normal Windows start menu that comes up in 200ms instead of the Gnome 3.0 menu that takes a little more time to load with a lot of applications installed, then you have to scroll down through a huge wall of icons with very small label text to find what you are looking for. The Linux Mint 11 default menu is quite usable in comparison, you are presented with simple shortcuts to all the categories of applications that are installed and the shortcuts to Computer, Home Folder, Network, Desktop Trash et cetera,. It is a fast and easy to use menu and far better than the Gnome 3.0 Activities menu that does not make any sense at all to me, if you want to create a new desktop for the Linux operating system, then look elsewhere for inspiration than the MacOS desktop that everyone is copying at the moment.