Well, it’s official – twelve more days remain until the November 17 release of Fedora 12 (Constantine). I, for one, can hardly wait – Fedora 11 has been rock-solid for me so far (under Gnome, anyways – but I’ll leave that subject alone) and I can only imagine that Fedora 12 is going to bring more of the same my way.
Among some of the more notable changes being made that caught my interest:
- Gnome 2.28 – the current version bundled into my Fedora 11 distribution, 2.26.3, has been nothing but amazing. Unflinchingly stable, fast, and reliable – it’s everything I want in a desktop environment.
- Better webcam support – not sure how this can get any better from my perspective since my LG P300’s built-in webcam worked straight out of the box on Fedora 11, but I’m interested to see exactly what they bring to the table here
- Better IPv6 support – since our router does actively support this protocol, it’s nice to see Fedora taking charge and always improving the standard
- Better power management – for me, this is a major headache under Gnome (I know, I know…) since it really doesn’t let me customize anything as much as I would like to.  Among other things, it’s supposed to offer better support for wake-from-disk and wake-from-RAM. We’ll see.
I’m sure that Tyler and I will keep you posted as the due date gets closer, and especially once we’ve done the upgrade itself!
Thanks to all the nice people who have been Digging this article up. Nice to see there’s some other excitement revolving around Constantine – feel free to comment on here or on Digg as well if you’re interested!
I left Fedora because either with frickeling around I could not get my mobile internet stick to work. On Ubuntu it was plug-and-play.
Fedora is both a blessing and a curse.
On one hand it supports cutting edge tech that even some Ubuntu-ish distros (I’m looking at you Linux Mint) are lacking. This difference can have a serious impact on usability. Take Sasha’s experience as an example; we are running the exact same hardware and there are still compatibility problems that Sasha has that I simply don’t while running Fedora.
On the other hand, due to the cutting edge tech, Fedora seems to be far less stable/supported. By that I don’t mean to imply that the Fedora community isn’t great (for the most part they really are), but rather that there are still some kinks to work out. Just take a look at Dana’s and my constant graphics issues. In comparison to Sasha’s experience, simply requiring a button press to enable the correct graphics driver, ours have been horrendous.