Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score 1)

Can you please explain how are power users disadvantaged in terms of flexibility if they chose FC3 as a distro over Debian, Gentoo or Slack? What is it that they can do with any of those distributions and not with Fedora? I am really curious to find out

Ease of installation / upgrade. I know, yum / apt is available for fedora. I read several howtos for various incompatible apt repositories and the only ones I ever got working were so slow it would take a week to install openoffice. I have broadband.

Yum never worked quite right for me either.

No mp3 support. I read everywhere how it's so easy to add; I tried FC1 and the only way I could find to add it was through additional, horribly slow apt repositories. Once again, I never managed to upgrade everything that needed mp3 support.

I use kde. Same story, just a handful of highly annoying things that are broken. Can't even recall anymore, and to be fair I haven't touched fedora since 'core 1' so perhaps these issues are gone.

I know, I know, there are a thousand l33t fedora h4x0rs out there who had no trouble with exactly the things I'm talking about. None of these are showstoppers by themselves (well maybe the apt/yum troubles), but after a while I call it "dying of a thousand papercuts". It just went on and on, and in spite of the notorious non-graphical (gasp) installer on debian, I found it far easier to manage.

It's a shame really, I think fedora looks slick and I was a long time redhat user (4.something until RH9). But the whole fedora thing was absolutely obnoxious on redhat's part; I remember spending a good deal of time laboring under the impression that I would never even be able to upgrade RH9 unless I paid several hundred dollars. By the time I found out otherwise I had already jumped ship.

-kev