Please don't forget their bittorrent offerings, since that protocol was designed for the exact situation where a lot of people want a very big file at the same time.
Could anyone comment on using Fedora on small screen device, such as my 1024x600 netbook? My current installation, Linux Mint 12 needs upgrading, and doesn't handle the low vertical resolution well. Many dialogs are too large and/or are positioned partly outside the screen, and the two horizontal bar layout is not optimal.
Fedora ships with support for several desktop environments, which are easily installable, such as XFCE, LXDE, Sugar, and several others (including, of course, KDE as well!). Fedora's default is Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean it's your only choice. The other options might be more suitable for a low resolution display.
Through 3rd-party packages, other environments might also be available, such as Cinnamon and MATE.
Ubuntu. Ubuntu Unity is designed for tablets, netbooks, etc. One of the biggest complaints right now is that it's too designed for small screens, and lost too much utility on desktops (multimonitor especially).
Especially if you're coming from Mint, an Ubuntu derivative, everything will still work more like what you're used to than Fedora or other non-Ubuntu/Debian derivatives.
I've been using Ubuntu on both my 10" Asus EeePC netbook and newer my 12" HP dm1 4050us for the past two years, no complaints.
Really? I've been pretty unhappy with it on mine. The large, permanent top bar, the enormous window chrome, combined with the miserable vertical screen real estate on my netbook are all... aggravating. The performance on Atom's GPU is also erratic and often multi-second laggy (though it's much better than 3.0 was).
I wound up switching to KDE, which has... strange characteristics, but window management is butter smooth, like you might hope for in 2012. About as smooth as it was before everyone switched to compositing.
Are we talking about the same Gnome 3? Mine has a thin toolbar for the clock, and all the other UI is hidden unless you mouse over the top left corner. It works extremely well on the comparatively small MacBook Pro 13", to the point that I'm now seeking the best linux distro to offer as close to vanilla Gnome 3 experience as possible.
The vertical space occupied by the top bar and title bar on my box (not a netbook) is 58 pixels. Honestly I suspect that's the lowest vertical overhead among mainstream desktops, though I don't have a copy of Unity running next to it to check. Certainly the OS X Dock and Windows 7 start bar are much bigger.
I just measured! Gnome 3 is about 58 pixels, KDE is about 50. But the bar is on the bottom and hides, which means in practice there's just 20px of chrome in the way.
I am using Fedora 17 on Acer 11.1 network, AMD 1G dual core
it works so far the best in speed - compared to the mint 13 (both Mate and Cinnamon), ubuntu 12.04 that I tested. Everything works out of the box: suspend, wireless ... Initially Selinux stops the dropbox to work, but I found the tweak online to go around it easily. Used to be a huge fan of ubuntu, but the divided states of unity, gnomeshell (for some reason gnome shell under ubuntu works too slow on my machine), MATE, cinnamon ... kept me away (for now) from my favorite debian based distribution ...
I've used Fedora with KDE on 1280*800 without any significant problems. It has a dedicated netbook mode, but I just used it like this: http://i.imgur.com/wmzzY.png It's an old screenshot, I don't have that setup now, but you can spot one window of the browser on the right side and see that it's pretty slim height-wise. KDE allows you to get rid of decorations pretty easily or make them small if you want them for certain applications. And I believe that with a bit of work you can make it nice as well.
I use Fedora on my netbook. I use the Xmonad tiling window manager, that maximizes the space used by windows. It is really great for small screens.
I was surprised when I installed Fedora 16 how well Xmonad integrates with Gnome. It comes with a Xmonad-Gnome session that has the advantages of both worlds (at least for me).
I've been using the beta for a month or two now, and I must say that I'm impressed. I didn't think I'd like the new shell in Gnome 3, but I don't have any complaints and is actually pretty slick. I'm running it on a T420 and it supports all the hardware perfectly and seems to get better battery life than Kubuntu (Maybe different kernel version or something...).
I love being able to install any needed development tools with a simple "sudo yum install".
I'm not sure that documentation is correct - there were some changes in the installer for F17 that lowered that memory requirement and we explicitly tested installs with 512 MiB (the hard coded minimum for install with Fedora 17). I've seen reports of successful installs with 384 MiB and enough swap (using the nomemcheck boot parameter) but AFAIK, that isn't supported and YMMV.
As far as why the installer needs that much memory, there are several things but yum, rpm and selinux are big memory users.
While it is a little old, one of the Anaconda (the name of the installer used in Fedora) developers did an analysis on where all the memory is used during installation [1] which I found to be rather interesting.
I believe yum, Fedora's package manager, is the one with the RAM requirement. Packages are represented in Python (the language in which yum is implemented) as objects, which take up a chunk of memory per instance.
As others said, it's because of the sucky Python install tools. Once installed you can get rid of that lot and it'll run in smaller amounts of memory, although still not nearly as small as one of the Linux distros that's designed to be minimal.
Unfortunately redhat based distros don't support keeping the install minimal past installing the first few things afterwards. There is no --no-instal-recommends --no-install-suggests for RPM based distros and no (easy) way to acheive that either.
It's for this reason that I have, over the past year, discovered that my favorite server OS is debian minimal (with those above flags entered into apt.conf) while my favorite desktop is without a doubt Fedora / gnome3.
This is exactly the opposite of the norm I think, but, fedora pushes the desktop boundaries far further than ubuntu and debian is so highly optimised for minimal server setups.
I gave up using "desktop" distro (fedora and ubuntu) for keeping a minimal desktop installation. Too many packages installed by default, too many unrequired dependencies pulled installing new packages, too many problems updating to the newest release. Now I'm using Arch and pondering about gentoo/funtoo or other source based distro.
Download: https://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options
Changes for Desktop Users: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Release_...
Changes for System Administrators: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Release_...
Gnome 3.4 Release Notes: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.4/
F17 Feature List: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/FeatureList
F18 Planned Feature List: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/FeatureList
DistroWatch package version comparison: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora
Official release commentary (DVD extras style): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmWdYJTsKbM