OK, I've seen this comment several times and am slightly confused. Why do you believe this?
I use FC6 as my main desktop. To install, I just stuck in the DVD, chose the packages I want, and let it install. It finds my sound, network, etc.
Keep in mind that I am coming from FC and Red hat before that. I've never really tried other distros other than to quickly load them into a VM to see what they're like. Am I missing something? FC does everything I want in a desktop.
Maybe I'm geekier than I realized, and I just don't find this difficult, while others do. Let me know.
Thanks!
Shadow,
I like FC but its not a distro for newbies (well except me ;) its too bleeding edge! If you want a stable redhat without subscription go with CentOS.
The apps themselves are not as polished as they are when the ymake it to a mainline distro like redhat. If you know what your doing this is np to overcome.
I did that too, but didn't have your luck.
It installed just fine, but when it downloads the updates, the dependency check fails when I try to install them.
Automatically checking for updates is great, but when they won't actually install on top of a fresh clean install, it is pretty much useless.
It would also be nice if Gnome's volume control utility actually saved the settings you change between reboots. For some strange reason the default is to disable the microphone input, and every time I reboot I have to go back in and reconfigure it or when I use skype to make a call, the person on the other end thinks I'm making a prank call because they can't hear me.
If I want to set up a cross compiler system at work where I telnet or rsh into it all the time and I don't need a graphical front end or sound it works fine.
However, when I start doing different things on it, packages fail to compile all the time and I have to debug someone else's poorly commented and often hacked together code to do anything.
While I get paid to do that at work, I don't want to spend my time doing it at home as well.
If FC works well for you, by all means use it. It works well for me for some tasks as well, and I've got not problems using it for those since I usually have to test our products on it anyway since some of our customers are bound to call up with questions.
However, I've had problems with FC1, FC2, FC4 and FC6 when trying to set up relatively simple things when using it at home. I'm tired of wasting my time on it. As soon as I find some time, I'm going to start with a clean download of another distribution, and if I end up with too many problems with that, I'll just have two Windows PCs at home. Life is too short to spend my time screwing around with an OS that's primary appeal is that it is free. At some point my time simply isn't free, and the price of Windows starts seeming cheap in comparison.