Fedora 13 Desktop Features

Fedora 13 Beta is about to be released shortly and I am particularly happy with the desktop enhancements we have made in this release. Check out the announcement for more details.  In particular, the new set of defaults:

Shotwell Photo Manager:  Awesome program.  It has replaced both Gthumb and F-Spot.  Unlike F-Spot which pulls in a lot of Mono dependencies and requires you to import the photos into it’s library, Shotwell in it’s latest version included in Fedora 13 Beta can do photo management without importing them.  It is written in Vala and super fast.  

Mono Status:  There has been some confusion over the status of Mono in Fedora.  When Mono was originally included in Fedora, Beagle, Tomboy and F-Spot were the default applications. Beagle was too slow and had many bugs and was dropped from the default list soon after. Tomboy was replaced by Gnote in Fedora 12 and Fedora 13 replaces F-Spot by Shotwell.  Mono hasn’t included by default in the Fedora Live CD for the past several releases ever since Fedora 10 release.  So the current status is that Mono and Mono apps are still in the Fedora repository but none of them are still by default any longer. 

Déjà Dup Backup Tool:  It is a simple and well integrated backup tool that is a frontend to duplicity.  Duplicity uses librsync and gpg for encryption.  There is support for backing up to a remote location and everything from ftp, http. webdav, ssh to even Amazon S3 is supported and with encryption to top it off.  I hope this encourages more Fedora users to do regular backups of their critical data.  Incidentally this tool is written in Vala as well.  I am a maintainer of this one

Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client: With micro-blogging on the rise,  a lot of distributions have started boasting about “social networking” capabilities.  Many of them include Gwibber by default.  Gwibber was nice but it has recently gotten a dependency on desktopcouch and seems too bloated at this point.   Pino is what we included by default in Fedora 13 and while there a few UI quirks,  I am expecting them to ironed out and this program to become well rounded soon.   Yet another program we include that is written in Vala.  I am a co-maintainer for Pino.  All this might seem a focused effort towards adopting Vala programs but that is just a coincidence.  The important part is features and functionality.  Speed and less dependency bloat does not hurt either.  

Homogonizing the different images:  Thanks to Colin Walter’s efforts, the differences between the defaults in the Desktop Live image and non-live images are mostly gone with the obvious exception of Openoffice.org which is not part of the Live image. 

I, of course have not covered all the features that range from automatic printer driver installation,  experiemental 3D support via Nouveau for Nvidia cards to a command line interface to NetworkManager and many many more.  Read the Fedora 13 Beta announcement for that. 

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