Well its out in the wild and can be downloaded from your favourite ISO or Torrent website.
MUCH MUCH better than 10 & 11 which were buggy and lacked functionality, not really Fedora’s fault, Gnome was in flux as was X, Fedora aim to release the latest software in each release so their fortunes are tied somewhat to the other developers.
Did a fresh install as the upgrade path requires 300MB in your /boot partition, and the default for Fedora has always been 200MB. Rather than mess about with resizing logical volumes I just saved the few files which were important and started from scratch.
Gnome is up to 2.28, OpenOffice 3.1, Firefox 3.5. Compiz is now much better supported as is the hardware on my laptop, didn’t need to download firmware images for my (broadcom) wireless adaptor, in fact all hardware plus all ancilliaries (USB webcam, Bluetooth adaptor etc.) installed with not a gesture required from me. Synaptics touchpad is now correctly identified by HAL and X so I can turn off tap-to-click which I am too clumsy to use. System is running in 750MB of memory and goes very quick and smooth. Graphics are Radeon Mobile 1100 using 256MB of main memory and run very well, also identified and loaded correctly wirh no intervention from me.
Multimedia support needs to be installed as an extra from third party repositories,it’s no big deal, takes ten minutes and there are umpteen thousand guides on how to do it on the web. This will always be the way with Fedora so if its too much trouble leave well alone, use Ubuntu instead. 9.10 is out and is quite good, if you like Ubuntu’s way of doing things, which I don’t. It’s all down to preference.
Screenshots enclosed - themes are down to taste but I like mine quite minimalist. There’s mucho plenty eye candy if you want it including moving slideshow desktops. Personally, I love it, very polished, very capable. Has all the things for grown-ups that Windows does not offer me (hey Bill, why can’t I configure auto-updates off in Winders when on mobile broadband? The amateurs can :D), and runs well on a low-spec laptop. Why should I upgrade to some monster with 3GB of RAM just to mail, manipulate images and surf on the move? Not I, all I need is here, for free.
Five penguins out of five