I generally only update once beta is released. This time however, I really wanted to play with GNOME3.8 and well, "accepted my fate" as anaconda puts it. Fedora 19 is pretty stable for me already. I did a fresh install. Anaconda worked well. The first glitch was both anaconda and gnome-initial-setupwanting to set up users. A bug and its fix are already on the way. Gnome3's new "welcome to gnome" application is also pretty good. It ensures that new users know what they can do with the desktop. It also tries to shift people to the new way the desktop is to be used, since people trying to use it as GNOME2.X really have a very difficult time with it.

The first major bug I ran into came with an X update. 1.14.0-6 broke X for me completely.. It got pushed to stable in spite of my negative karma since it appears to work OK for others.

The next bug I thought I had hit was suspend/hibernate not working. The system would hibernate/suspend just right, but wouldn't resume from the state. It would start as if it had been powered off. I found this wiki page and adding the "resume=/dev/where/swap/is" does seem to fix it for me. I'm not certain if this is required, but no harm having it in the grub command line. So far so good. When it did finally resume, X started failing again. X doesn't resume with the system. A new X starts, killing whatever apps were running, bringing up GDM, as if I were never logged in. My screen instance is the only application that survives, since it only gets detached when it's terminal is killed. It's how I figured out what was happening. I filed a bug for this already too. There's a patch upstream already which seems to fix it, so it's only a matter of time.

A bug that really kills my usability is to do with gnome-online-accounts and evolution. I use gmail with goa for my mail, along with Microsoft Exchange for university mail. GOA doesn't seem to like exchange. It crashes repeatedly. Abrt filed a bug for me here. I shifted to using IMAP instead of exchange and it works well now. However, I couldn't set up this IMAP using GOA since GOA only seems to support the "PLAIN" authentication method for SMTP servers. The university's system requires a "LOGIN" authentication method. A bug for this is also filed here. While this is easy to work around, a really annoying bug is that evolution forgets all it's settings every time GOA crashes. So, all the settings I make to my accounts, such as security, signatures for accounts, reply to, subscription settings are lost each time GOA crashes. With exchange it was crashing frequently and made me set up evolution again and again. It seems to be an issue with signals that GOA uses and how clients use these signals. The bug is here, it's already filed upstream and a fix is pushed to evolution 3.8.2 which we'll see in a week or two.

I can't remember any other big bugs that need squashing. Bijiben is up for review. I made an rpm and am using it now, instead of Gnotes. I do like the simple layout that Bijiben has. I used to manually spread out my Gnotes on a work space, and I don't have to do it with Bijiben anymore. It's still an application in its infancy and a lot of features are still in queue.

If you have the time, switch to F19 now and help test it out. The more testing it gets, the better it will be at release!