I promise you, this is not intended as a troll or rant. I just need to vent a little here, maybe it'll help.
I send my venting to /dev/null :D OK - that's not true, I vent on lists sometimes too ...
New to a fresh install of FC3 on the same machine that's been
running Linux (and only Linux) for 4-5 years, I bring up RB, the new
default I'm told will be staying with Fedora development, not the age-
old XMMS that worked so well.
There actually is a sane reason for moving away from xmms as default - I don't know if this is Fedora's reason, but I'll offer it anyway.
Rhythmbox uses a GStreamer backend. GStreamer is a multimedia framework that many applications can use - install appropriate plugin, and lots of apps benefit. xmms also uses plugins, but they are for xmms - GStreamer is a framework intended for use by LOTS of multimedia players, video and audio, and even to provide multimedia capability to apps who's primary purpose is not multimedia. I think there is a GPS application for nar navigation that uses GStreamer for its audio output, for example.
With respect to Rhythmbox - I have become less fond of it as it has gotten older. I can't pinpoint why.
Currently I primarily use gamp - a GStreamer backend audio player that will play my aac filres. I really like the UI of another GStreamer player, Eina - but it does not work on fc3 for me. Another one I have been looking at is Jamboree. It only wants to play mp3 and ogg at the moment, but it is faster than Rhythmbox at startup (I haven't tested it with a huge library) and offers smart playlist etc. It's young (all of the Rhythmbox alternatives are) but I'm hoping that it will mature, add support for audio other than ogg/mp3 - it's a nice player.
First I have to tell it what to play, or I'll be listening to the same song(s) all the time. I tell it to open /shares/Music where I keep several hundred titles, and three hours later, it's still stepping it's way through the list.
Yes, Rhythmbox is slow at indexing a large collection.
I kill it, part stays behind and keeps the CPU usage at 100%, mysteriously. When it eventually gets done, it will *still* play the same song twice in a row, despite shuffle being turned on.
That I haven't experienced myself.
Evolution's new- let's see what's been added: Connector. (Great if I'm ever sentenced to a workplace with Windows, there must be more) Well, they've moved things around, the 'map it' fuction's still not there, musta been some _other_ version of 2.0 it was intended to be introduced in. The fonts are uglier....nothing much else changed.
I don't like evolution myself. I prefer Balsa. Balsa has its own quirks, but less than evolution imho. The balsa that ships with FC3 doesn't work so well, but 2.2.5 does.
OpenOffice is still there. My whimpy AMD 1300 isn't up to the challenge tonight
I can't stand OO.o. I prefer the AbiWord/Gnumeric combo.
-=-=-=-=-=-
I think there is a general problem in Fedora of defaulting to bloated big software packages.
OO.o is a perfect example - sure, I think it's the only OSS way to view PowerPoint - but I think AbiWord is a better word processor, especially for creating rtf files - and I'm almost 100% positive that Gnumeric is a better spreadsheet program.
When it comes to MS Office documents, I haven't had one sent to me that AbiWord doesn't handle well, I have found some on the web when I specifically search for complex word documents - but OO.o didn't handle them well either.
Exporting to Office - AbiWord understands KISS. While OO.o will try to write to a .doc format, AbiWord creates a .rtf file and calls it a .doc and that works very well without introducing bugs of a reverse engineered document format. It works really well - AbiWord creates excellent .rtf files.
Same with Evolution - I think it is overly complex for what 95% of the users need. Let those who specifically need exchange compatability install Evolution, but put your efforts into and default to a smaller code base leaner e-mail client, like Balsa.
