Redhat 7.3 actually performs better on my system (64mb RAM, PIII 667) than 7.2. It runs GUIs better and is very stable.
The absence of certain packages such as linuxconf, enlightenment etc are sometimes felt. Also the logic behind switching from a 2.4.7-10 kernel to 2.4.18-3 isn’t really clear. Maybe it is a better kernel, but a lot of support has been removed from the previous one.
Right from installation, we find that RedHat has gone to a large extent to give excellent graphics and provide a good desktop system. Unfortunately, the graphics, though good aren’t as efficient as MS-Windows graphics.This maybe due to the unavailability of hardware specifications to the free software community. But it should be mentioned that it gives better performance than Windows 2000 on the same hardware.KDE 3 is a welcome addition to the graphics lover. This version of KDE is highly customizable and doesn’t eat up as much resources as its counterpart in the 7.2 distribution.
RH 7.3 is more user friendly than its predecessors but you should still have some idea about file systems, disk partitions etc to get going. I believe that every computer user should know such basic things.
One of the things that makes me angry is that certain hardware which was supported before is no longer supported. Most on-board sound cards which were supported earlier are now unavailable. Maybe they can be compiled in later.
The new CD-writing utilities like KonCD promise to make cd recording in linux more user friendly.Burnproof buffer underrun prevention has been added to this interface to cdrecord.
Last but not the least, there is no threatening EULA or messy product keys to worry about. Long live GPL.