Expecting Mint to be another good one as long as Clem shuts up and sticks to writing great software.

That was good news to hear this week.

Thanks again for the review.

I cannot, however, recommend any Fedora release to a beginner unless they are a self driven beginner. The Free Software stance alone is enough to keep people away. I am sure that Adam will howl about this, but the last couple of releases, while very much leading edge, have not been the models of stability or ease of installation because there have been a number of impediments that a large number of people have complained about.

That does not make Fedora (any version) a lousy release; it is a leader in quite a few respects, as I have highlighted. I just think it is best for the experienced user, one who will use it, test it, evaluate it, and report back on findings. I have done so many times in the past; unfortunately for me, this is not one of those times, for I feel it does require an investment in time, both to take advantage of it, scope out potential issues and their solutions, report defects to help improve it, etc., and right now, I just cannot devote much time to those things.

I wouldn’t push people away from Fedora, but I would hesitate to recommend it to a beginner without at least bringing up its strengths and weaknesses. It has a LOT of strengths; it has a few weaknesses – the cutting edge nature sometimes reveals things unexpected that the user community finds after release. Based on my own experiences with Fedora 7,8,9,10, and 11, (I think I liked 7 and 10 best, but had a horror of an experience with 11 Final after a great initial Live experience with 11 Alpha), I would leave this one to the veterans.

The live CD is somewhat light on software because of space issues. Fedora ships a very large range of languages on its live CDs which reduces the space available for software, so there isn’t room for OO.o. For F13 we’re probably going to introduce a 1GB or 2GB size live spin, which you could burn to a DVD or write to a USB stick. That will allow us to include software that doesn’t fit on the current live images.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Fedora in theory (though I hate their package management), but there are many distros ahead of Fedora that I would recommend to beginners.

Running the Gnome LiveCD right now on the laptop. Wireless had to be set up manually, but it did work(Atheros). I also like the fact that it includes only the essentials. I can do all the photo work I need on Gthumb, including light editing. All I had to add was Gnumeric, K3B, and Wine. It still makes me wonder though, with such a minimal compliment of preinstalls, how did they still get to 694mb?

Oh well, still a very fine effort. It seems as if Fedora is finally getting in the game. Ubuntu should be very worried. I for one, am switching to Fedora on my desktop machine, and will run it in VM on the laptop under Vista until I can do a bit more stand alone testing. After that, it may replace Vista on the laptop. Unfortunately Ubuntu has lost me with their failure to support my laptop video and other oddities since version 9.04. They finally got wireless right, but that is about all.

It should come as no surprise that Flash and DVDs don’t work out-of-the-box as with most major Linux distributions they cannot (legally) include these pieces. It takes a moment to install it, but it isn’t a killer.

On the plus side, my Broadcom wireless card was recognized and available out-of-the-box in Fedora 12! A First! No need to use fwcutter or anything to slice-and-dice the proprietary drivers! This alone is a feature I hope the other distributions include!