Although a few of the discs were bad, I managed to get working discs for Fedora 16 KDE, LXDE, and XFCE. I didn't bother with the GNOME spin, since I was using a Pentium-III 1.2GHz laptop as my guinea pig, and I have never liked GNOME (or OS X) anyway. I started with the KDE version.
Starting with the KDE version on a machine as low-powered as I was using was probably not the best idea in the world. The load time was very long, and I got the impression that the current incarnation of KDE is very cumbersome for the CPU. Something to do with indexing kept crashing, and before long the whole thing started to feel very unstable. For some reason it would sometimes boot to just the background rather than the login screen, and sit there until I crashed X with CTRL-ALT-Backspace, at which point it would reload correctly and give me the login screen. The entire window manager locked up pretty regularly, requiring me to crash out X and log back in. I never could get Adobe Flash to work, either. Initially, I couldn't even get it to install an RPM package from the file manager, but after a reboot, it finally did; first Opera (nice browser, you really should try it) then Flash, but I never got Flash to work. Eventually I decided that KDE was just too sluggish and unstable to be worth fooling with on this machine and pulled out the LXDE spin.
The LXDE spin really did run well. It didn't crash in the whole time I was experimenting with it.....which was probably only an hour or so. It felt very feature-starved and primitive, and didn't even offer a way to install an RPM from the file manager. Since I was looking at this as a "normal person," who doesn't know or care about Terminal windows, this made it a total non-starter. It renewed my confidence in the core of the OS, which KDE had been rather wearing thin, and I pulled out the XFCE spin.
The XFCE spin seemed to me to be the best of the lot. It was stable, feature-rich, and responsive. If I had to use a Fedora 16 product, that would be the one I would choose. The XFCE desktop was nice, offering little amenities that Windoze users have come to expect, such as the ability to drag icons from the "start" menu to the desktop. It would also allow installation of RPM packages from the File Manager, and that worked without much hassle, though not perfectly--the first time I tried, it did nothing for 5 minutes, and then told me several times that something had timed out, then next time I tried it, it worked.
Still, several things disturbed me about Fedora 16, even with the polished XFCE desktop. First, I never could get Flash to work. Opera and Firefox both knew that it was installed, but neither could use it correctly. A quick web search revealed that various Flash problems are common in Fedora 16. Second, there was no obvious way to remove RPM packages installed from the File Manager. The package manager did not appear to get updated when I did that, so it didn't think that there were any installed packages to remove, which was untrue, as I had installed two. Then the power management service started to crash, and I gave up and reinstalled Puppy on the hard drive.
I went into the experiment wanting to like Fedora. To be fair, I did like Fedora. It simply wasn't up to the level of feature-completeness that I was used to with Puppy, which is strange, considering that Fedora and its parents have been developed for a much longer period of time. It also felt too geeky, even for me. I am savvy enough that I could have made it work just fine, but normal people would get completely lost in a matter of minutes.
Puppy is the way forward for Linux, as for as I'm concerned. It is fairly conservative, which makes it feel familiar, and yet it is feature-rich and stable. With a few flat bugs, it could really go a long way.
Now read my post in the long-term support thread, if you didn't get here from there.
