When Fedora 9 shipped just over six months ago, Bryan and I were not exactly blown away by what we saw in fact, while we had some positive things to say, over all we were not overly impressed. Fedora 8 faired even worse in our review for the most part.
One of the major things we complained quite about was the lack-luster theme in Fedora 8 & 9, which generated quite a strong response, and motivated us to interview the lead of the Fedora Art Team.
My hopes were high for Fedora 10, and I honestly think they have delivered the best theme we have seen since the DNA theme in Fedora 6 . The new theme for Fedora 10 is called ‘Solar’ and I really like it.
Watch the video review for screen shots and more info:
Some of the other features I think are great in Fedora 10:
- Improved Boot Times, with less or no flicker of the screen when X11 starts – This makes it “less scary” for new Windows converts.
- Fedora 10 has improved Printing in a lot of ways, a simpler printer configuration window, and a solid improvements to the print job monitor
- The PulseAudio sound server has been rewritten to use timer-based audio scheduling. They claim this puts Fedora’s audio system on par with OS X and Vista, further testing will verify that claim. They also mention Less hardware wakeups, which should result in reduced power consumption.
As someone who has observed the open source community for a while now (many, many years) there have been different times where I have felt that one group of people, or certain projects were really pulling ahead from the pack in terms of new real ingenuity and great code.
For the last several releases of Fedora that has been a clear that they are introducing new code and features that impact the entire desktop Linux landscape.
- AIGLX that enable great 3D composting effects, AKA Compiz
- Network Manager that makes managing your network connection possible for humans
- Virtualization Tools like Virt-Manager
- They’ve led the pack on EXT4 support and development
For the Linux desktop as a whole, Fedora is bringing a lot to the party. They are like that friend that brings a ton of great snacks to your party… You know the one, the one you kind of count on to help take on that bit of work for you. Sure the party would still go on if they did not show up, but it sure makes your life easy with that friend around and the party goes smoother with their help.
Fedora seems to have reached a point with their 10th release where almost all complaints have been answered, or at least have an easy enough solution (AKA Codec buddy to get needed video and audio codecs).
My attention turns from issues with the distribution, and more towards issues with the Fedora team’s poor communication. I won’t rehash it all in this post, I’d just rather direct you to Bryan’s Blog post regarding the matter I think he covered it well.
Overall Fedora 10 looks to be a great release, and I think really sets the bar that the other new distributions need to meet. There is a lot of great technology in Fedora that was built and pioneered by the Fedora Project and RHE (Red Hat Enterprise) folks that we often see trickle down to other distributions, to me, that is the very definition of setting the standard.
