I’ve been running Fedora 11 at home and work for a three days now, and I am very impressed. With Linux being a very mature product and Fedora releasing twice a year, an upgrade isn’t the radical experience it was nine or ten years ago, when Linux was raw and new. Nowadays each release is an incremental improvement.

There are new versions of the familiar apps: Open Office 3.1.0, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.26.1, GCC 4.4.0, Python 2.6, Gimp 2.6, Pidgin 2.5.5. Open Office can open those annoying .docx files. Gnome’s menus seem a bit tidier. PulseAudio is meant to be much better. Will hopefully solve my friends’ sound problems, but it was alright on my laptop before, so I haven’t noticed that difference.

Boot times are faster. The goal for Fedora 11 was to be at the login screen in 20 seconds. On my laptop it takes 30 seconds, but that’s still pretty good. My laptop is a Dell D620 with, I’m very happy to report, suspend and resume working perfectly on it. Also fixed on my laptop is an annoying problem Fedora 9 had with simulated middle mouse button clicks. Now either the top two or the bottom two touchpad buttons can be used. Power usage is meant to be optimised, haven’t tested if this means I get an extended battery life yet.

The kernel installed is 2.6.29.4. This is a bit of a problem at work, as VMware-Player can’t build modules to run against this version. Ubuntu, openSuse and Gentoo users have also hit this problem. There are long, complicated, discussion forum threads with different patches which claim to fix things, but don’t work for me. Eventually VMware will catch up and release a new version of VMware-Player which will work with the 2.6.29 kernel. It’s a pain to wait, but that’s what you get with kernel code which doesn’t live with the rest of code in the kernel source tree.

Fedora 11 has the new ext4 filesystem format as default. This should make file access faster. I was working on ext4 support at my previous job for their product. I’m a bit surprised the Fedora installer (Anaconda) won’t allow the root filesystem to be ext4. ext4 can support a mix of on-disk structures (pind/dind/tind blocks or extents) and I thought this allowed Grub to still boot from it. Oh well, ext3 will do for /boot until Grub2 is finished (or the world ends, whichever comes first).

Lastly the fonts look fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what has changed there. Fedora has had nice fonts for a while, but text is looking very smooth these days. Though I did have problems with DDD (the GDB debugger front end). The DDD user interface hasn’t changed much for many many years and obviously can’t use the new fonts. It was displaying very large ugly letters, so I installed a bunch of the old font packages like xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi. That’s fixed DDD so it is at least acceptable to work with.

I’m pretty pleased with how the upgrade has gone. All up Fedora 11 seems a bit faster, more polished and nice and stable. I recommend giving it a try.