Raiden's Realm: Review: CentOS 5

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Review: CentOS 5 (Page 3 of 6)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Jul 25, 2007 at 05:11pm
Section: Reviews
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Gnome

Gnome loads up very quickly from the login screen and gives you a rich, clean desktop that is surprisingly well setup for a Gnome install. The applications, places and system menus are reasonably well organized, giving you a choice of a fair number of default Gnome apps along with a few pre-installed apps the developers thought you’d need. Load times on most apps are respectable and are for the most part without hitch. I did find some issues with the interaction of the mouse with the system, including complete hangs, but I’m not sure if those were OS related or Gnome related. I was also surprised at the number of Kapps in the Gnome menus. That might have something to do with having KDE installed as well, so I can’t say that was intentional despite their prevalence in the Gnome menus. One thing I found that I didn’t like is that the system tools are a little sparse, considering there as only three items available, but I guess that’s ok, because there’s more than enough items under the system menu to give you everything and the kitchen sink in system maintenance and administration tools. The rest of the Gnome interface is everything you’d expect from Gnome.

The icon scheme seems to be centered around a cartoony, cell shaded design that reminds me more of an airline safety sign than a desktop icon. The quick launch has a nice selection of five basic application icons to get you started and the update manager located next to the clock to notify you of any updates or upgrades you should do to your install. One thing that did stand out that drove me nuts is the load time of apps under the Gnome desktop. A few were fairly snappy, but the rest felt like they didn’t want to load, or were fighting to do so. Even on applications that should have loaded instantly, especially some of the Gnome native applications, they took a very long time and there was way more disk activity than should have been necessary. And I can’t blame that on my system, because my test machine is no slouch.