Fedora 11
Last night I upgraded to Fedora 11. I have to say that I’m impressed! It’s the first Fedora upgrade in a long time which went in quickly and cleanly, without any problems that had me tearing my hair out, which was a problem with past releases (if I — a professional developer, sysadmin and geek — had trouble then you know that normal people did). Overall, Fedora 11 looks more like a ‘polishing’ release than a feature release: for the most part, things look & behave the same, but they do it better, with fewer bugs.
The latest GNOME desktop looks even nicer than before, with clean lines and subtly eye-pleasing colours. It’s an improvement on the last, which was itself an improvement over previous versions. Session state appears to be working again, which is good (it was broken in Fedora 10).
I was able to get SBCL, PostgreSQL and CLSQL easily installed and got my beer tasting notes site back up and running very easily.
Likewise for the rest of this website and for all the other programmes I have installed on this computer. All in all it’s been a remarkably pain-free — even enjoyable — upgrade experience.
I can recommend the upgrade whole-heartedly. For those of you stuck on broken, proprietary, freedom-hating OSes: now’s the time to switch over. It’s worth it, really.