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Fedora 12 Beta Released
AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."
I've been a loyal fedora user since Fedora 8 when I made the switch to it for my primary OS. I upgraded to Fedora 11 from Fedora 8, and now my system has been constantly becoming unresponsive, even the xconfig changes mentioned on their errata page reduced the freezing but still get it randomly. As for the commercial ATI drivers, they suck and all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor so I for one am praying they have finally resolved this issue in the next release.
..."brown, and shit"... was that intentional?
Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configuration in xorg.conf) has been partially broken on all the 6-8 computers I've tried it on. The beta of Kubuntu 9.10 did not have working multi-monitor support at all!
So I'm currently running Windows 7, which beats the *brown* out of Ubuntu. At least on my new shiny hardware. I'm thinking about trying another distribution, just have not decided which one yet. Fedora sounds nice (especially the thing about improved sound and video), you recommend OpenSUSE, and I've also heard a lot of good things about Mandriva. Decisions, decisions...
Agreed. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have enough core developers for what they try to do. My feeling is that they have grown out of control. The original "one CD with limited options and only the best software" mantra that made Ubuntu 4.10 interesting has been cast off, universe and multiverse are huge and unmanageable, and core technologies are broken every release.
When your default applications have blocker bugs (F-Spot photo manager sidebar is invisible, F-Spot doesn't work on a supported platform, included plug-ins don't work on Totem movie player or Rhythmbox music manager, or Brasero burning application can't burn a DVD, for starters) and well- and long-supported chipsets with open drivers fail to work with new versions (RaLink wireless and i945 graphics), there really is no reason to release.
Canonical needs to step back, Ubuntu needs to consolidate, and both need to focus on "just works in default install" issues.
Put identity in the browser.