Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Korora 21 Cinnamon: (Almost) the Mint of the Fedora world

Korora aims to be the easiest-to-use Fedora-based distribution. It is supposed to be very easy to install and use. I was interested by this, and I decided to review it and see if it lives up to its promise.

GA desktop.png



1. First impressions and ease of use

The ISO is 1.8 GB in size and can be downloaded from https://kororaproject.org/download. There are GNOME, Cinnamon, KDE, and Xfce versions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with Guest Additions out of the box.

Initial Desktop.png

Interestingly, the panel is at the top compared to Linux Mint’s implementation at the bottom:

Initial Desktop.png

It still feels easy to use though, and anyone who sits down can use it without any questions.

Ease of use score: 10/10

2. Installer

Korora, like Fedora, comes with the Anaconda installer which is nice and easy to use. You can read about another blogger’s experience here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/hands-on-a-screenshot-walk-though-fedoras-anaconda/

Here are some screenshots:

Installer1.pngInstaller2.pngInstaller3.pngInstaller4.pngInstaller5.pnginstall.png

Installer score: 10/10



Release date
ISO size (GB)
Distribution base
Default filesystem
Install time
Boot time
Size of install
Desktop RAM use
Kernel Version
KaOS 2015.02
2/24/2015
1.4
Independent
XFS
18:03
0:36
4.6
415
3.18.7
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
2/25/2015
1.1
Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)
ext4
12:57
0:27
4.2
457
3.19.1
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
2/6/2015
1.4
Arch
ext4
11:33
0:27
4.7
351
3.16.7
Netrunner 15
2/16/2015
1.9
Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)
ext4
16:20
0:41
6.4
714
3.16.0
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
11/4/2014
4.4
Independent
Btrfs (used ext4 because of known bug)
15:29
0:39
4.4
422
3.16.6
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
2/17/2015
0.6
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
5:50
0:34
2.2
348
3.16.0
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
11/29/2014
1.4
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
8:45
0:42
4.5
343
3.13.0
Pinguy OS 14.04.2
3/22/2015
2.6
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
20:54
0:47
7.4
745
3.13.0
Korora 21 Cinnamon
2/6/2015
1.7
Fedora 21
ext4
13:24
1:04
5.0
602
3.18.3
Average of all distros

1.8


13:41
0:39
4.8
489


3. Design

Similar to Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, Korora looks current but not futuristic like KDE 5 based distros do. Again, though, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The login screen, however, is quite sparse unlike the attractive one featured in Mint 17.1:

login screen.png

I know I’ve said that font rendering was the best on Mint. I’m mistaken, it’s even better on Korora, especially on the web, which many distros seem to struggle with. Bonus points for including Cantarell for the window titles, which works especially well here.

excellent font rendering.png

Since it isn’t pure GNOME Shell or Unity, Cinnamon can be customized to your liking.

Design score: 9/10

4. Applications

Korora comes with the default GNOME-based application set:

Web Browser - Firefox
File Manager - Nemo
Email Client - Thunderbird
Text Editor - GEdit (not forked!)
Image Viewer - Image Viewer (GNOME)
Terminal Emulator - Terminal
Music Player - Rhythmbox
Office Suite - LibreOffice

Mostly, these are the same apps that come with Mint 17.1 Cinnamon. Unlike Mint, Korora includes Google in Firefox, but it has to be enabled (only two clicks though).

Applications score: 9.5/10

5. Installing packages

Being a Fedora fork, Korora uses Yum as its package manager. Although it’s simple to install packages using the terminal, it’s much harder to use a GUI to do it. The default tool is Yum Extender (Yumex). It is definitely not as easy to use as Mint’s software center.

yumex.png

Installing packages score: 7.5/10

Final Thoughts

Korora definitely lives up to its goal of being an easy to use Fedora-based distro, but installing packages could be made much easier using a better software center. It’s much easier to install packages using the terminal, at least at this state, and it compares quite well to Mint 17.1 in all other aspects.

Final score: 46/50 = 92%


Distro name
Final Score
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
99
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
97
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
95
Korora 21 Cinnamon
92
Pinguy OS 14.04.2
91
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
93
Netrunner 15
90
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
84
KaOS 2015.02
80
Average of all reviews
91

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