Kororaa 17: What Fedora should be!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Let’s be realistic for a moment here. I believe that there is not a single Fedora user who doesn’t use repositories that conflict with Fedora’s policy and default selection ideology. Not even the most hardcore Fedora developers can use the completely useless system that Fedora is out of the box, without adding third party sources and pieces of proprietary software.

I suppose that this was exactly what Kororaa developers thought and decided to regenerate the demonstration project that Kororaa once was, into a Fedora based distribution that would offer users everything they need out of the box and without all the hassle.

How exactly is Kororaa easier for the user?

Kororaa sets the default applications to those that end users typically want. For example VLC is the default media player instead of Gnome’s Totem.
Kororaa also pre-configures several third party repositories, making it easier to install additional software that everyone uses. These include: Adobe Flash, Google Chrome and Talk plugin, RPMFusion, VirtualBox
Kororaa offers an easier way to do everyday things like installing new software using Yumex instead of Yum.
Kororaa makes use of Ubuntu’s Jockey Device Driver manager, for simple installation of third party drivers such as those for NVIDIA graphics cards and certain wireless devices.

Why Kororaa is great

Whatever my opinion about Fedora’s policy, it is maybe the best distribution out there.

Fedora is the most stable distribution I ever used although it does really get a lot of updates every few days that include core system packages like the Linux kernel at least once every week.
These big updates let you enjoy the latest packages on the core system sector. On the other hand (applications, games etc) Fedora is behind Ubuntu in availability and in latest versions.
Fedora is a very fast distribution and I think it is the fastest Gnome Shell distribution that you can have without having to read manuals to install it.
The community of Fedora is very big and the support that stem from it is very satisfactory.

Now you take all this goodness and add some extras like useful repositories, a few Gnome Shell extensions, some tools that will provide easy installation of things that are needed in the real world and you have Kororaa. A distribution that people may actually keep after using for a while.

You’d better try HD

Among the hundreds of Linux distributions, Kororaa is one of the very few that have actually something real to offer to the user. It is really trying to make things easier with Fedora, the way Mint was trying to do with Ubuntu (but was meaningless for the last few years).

You may be the advanced user that doesn’t need anything from Kororaa’s offerings, but there are many people out there who need them, and a lot of people who tried Fedora and gave up because they had no clue on what to do in order to make it work for them. If you are one of those, you should give Kororaa a try and be amazed by the power of a more “friendly” Fedora!

Download Kororaa

liam

Thanks for bring this diatro some attention. Like you I think Fedora makes a fantastic base, but its repos are quite skimpy (for good reason, since Red Hat doesnt want to risk liability, and Fedora ha smany developers who are genuinely passionate about free software).
BTW, whats wrong with totem?

alex diavatis

I want to add, that Fedora is considered a parent distro. So it makes sense to don’t ship commercial software, so everyone can easily spin it.

liam

That is a great point I hadn’t considered.
As you say, it is easy to spin and given rpmfusion, atrpms, planetcore (for rt tools) and fedora people repos (basically ppas but people don’t seem to know about them) you have a vast base of easy to install apps. However, I really wish fedora would move over to the Suse developed OBS. When I ran suse I was amazed at the power of it. The ability to easily specify build targets (not just x86, or even suse derived) and act as repos (with suse you can easily have packages installed from 10s of repos). They also provide a web based method to roll your own distro (I forgot its name).

pyluyten

“Fedora is the most stable distribution I ever used”

While I use fedora every day without huge matter, still, it’s far from beeing the most stable one. From small bugs to freeze, I often experience some issue. When one knows the system, it’s not that hard to reboot, or init 1, or simply kill the guilty processes ; but seems difficult to write “stable” here…

alex diavatis

Distros can give different personal experiences. For example I installed few months ago OpenSUSE in 3 boxes. It was a triple disaster. My friends switched to Ubuntu in a few days..
But as I use have Fedora, yes I have also issues :)

Peter

” I believe that there is not a single Fedora user who doesn’t use
repositories that conflict with Fedora’s policy and default selection
ideology. Not even the most hardcore Fedora developers can use the
completely useless system that Fedora is out of the box, without adding
third party sources and pieces of proprietary software.”
Well, not really. At least I do not use any proprietary software on my system. Instead of adding proprietary software I replaced Fedora’s Linux with Linux-libre, which is a totally free kernel. As a replacement for the Adobe Flash Player I use Gnash, which already works on Youtube.

What indeed is missing in the (for me) are mp3-decoders, which are a patent, not a license issue, so the Fedora developers cannot do anything about it.

alex diavatis

I believe you have to use open software because is better, not “just” because is open. And in my personal opinion I don’t think that close source can follow the open, specially in the next few years with the financial crisis becoming stronger. People ask for free software, free of charge.
Of course there are many more reasons why open software have more potential than commercial, but cost is always a strong factor.

http://www.frothingthefrap.com/ Shannon Black

people get confused between FOSS and free software. Open source fanatics strive to use only free as in what they can do with the software and source code as a way of making a point to themselves and people who care. They don’t use it cause it is free. What this means is that they are willing to pay for software, they dont necessarily want “free as in beer” software, they just want the ability to take what they’ve paid for and customize it to suit their own needs, or to build on existing functionality. That is something you can’t achieve with closed source / proprietary software.

alex285

I totally agree, but there is another side of the coin. Eclipse and Webmin. Two great open source softwares that target mostly in web-developers that they are usually run Linux. Eclipse strongly recommends Oracle Java but it works also with openJDK (but not perfectly!), and Webadmin that doesn’t work at all with OpenJDK.

My point is that these two OS software organizations doesn’t care to ship their products for openJDK but they prefer to use the more mature and feature-rich Oracle.
Let users to make the choice, don’t force the open source. If commercial source was forbidden in Linux, there will be no Linux desktop at all. Ok, basically there isn’t Linux Desktop (ha!) but is seems it grows now, thanks to commercial software that arrives.. or vice versa!

ReinoutS

Hmpf, if Totem, for whatever reason, is not up to par, then the right course of action would be to fix whatever bugs there are instead of replacing it with VLC. Totem integrates way better with Gnome, for instance preventing the screen saver from kicking in after a certain time.
MarioT

Yes, Kororaa is very nice. I also switched to it with version 17. although I also got fed up with GNOME3 stupidity and just switched to KDE edition. Linux has never been better!
Miggs

In my tests it didn’t run very fast. Did you try Gnome shell on Debian Wheezy?
Archdevil

I would love to try Kororaa. But my Asus Essentio CM6730 doesn’t want to run any of the installation media. Just like it refuses the Fedora ones. Perhaps someone here can give me directions on how to make it work. The guys at the Kororaa IRC channel really tried to help, but they couldn’t make out what is casuing this either.

Bill_Toulas

You best bet would be the Fedora Forums. This is your only chance to find help from other Asus Essentio users who tries to install Fedora 17 – http://www.fedoraforum.org/

http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen-Green/100001808911369 Stephen Green

You’ve hit the nail right on the head. The developers of Fedora are ‘locked’ in and unable, legally or otherwise (Red Hat) to compete with the likes of Ubuntu. I’ve been following Fedora for years. Tried it out numerous times, but never bothered to stick with it. I call Fedora the busy one, as you need to do a lot of work after installing. I use Linux exclusively and am constantly changing my OS to the newest or the ‘latest’ release of this one or that one. Sort of a ‘distro junkie’ as it were. But I find certain Linux versions to be to much for me. Lately, in my old age, (66) I just want to install something quickly and have a usable system available in short order. I’m lazy.! But the ‘noobs’ coming here from the land of virus and malware need this type of complete system. Well done article about a well a well done remix..
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