It honestly feels like a huge improvement over Fedora Core 6 and I have no idea why. It could merely be the looks, but this is probably the best distro besides Ubuntu that i've used and this is on par with Ubuntu. Anyways, let me know what you think is the best thing about it.

Lol...that makes absolutely no sense. My impression in the brief time I had it installed was that the KDE desktop looked more polished, it booted much faster, YUM experienced some speed improvements, and the install process was easier and required less time. Those were the improvements anyway.

ntfs-3g support out of the box.

1 less step in configuring a new dual-boot system

I'm glad it's not just me that's happy with it then

It installed very easily, my wireless worked out of the box (which was the main thing for me) and everything else has done - including NTFS as someone else said. It seems faster, there are certainly more packages in the standard repos (which is very nice) and overall I'm pleasantly surprised after expecting to have to do a bit of work to get everything going.

I am really happy with F7 !

I performed a clean install to replace FC6 on my main box, with all my stuff backed up... I didn't even bother to download the DVD... The live-cd was fine, no problem whatsoever.

I added the Livna repos, also the Macromedia one... Everything very smooth !

I am really impressed with the quality of that release ! Seems like the best ever...

I got tired of the Fedora Core 4 on my government-issued Dell desktop at work. So I prepared for a clean install by rsync-ing my precious data to another box on our intranet.

I wanted to try Ubuntu Feisty, but the install dropped into what seemed like a crippled shell with some arcane error about "can't access tty; job control turned off." A quick google suggested that this would be a long struggle with an uncertain outcome. Who needs it? The thrill of overcoming challenges is wonderful, but I readily admit to liking "just works."

So -- lest I get too OT -- on to Fedora 7. Installation? Cake!

First bootup: no network. A little poking in System -> Administration -> Network and there's your problem, eth0 not activated by default. I turned on "Activate device when computer starts" and "Enable all users to activate this device," saved and exited. Next bootup, same story. So there's a minor annoyance but I am fairly sure I will eventually figure out what's up.

I also struggled with mp3 support, even after doing all the good yum stuff suggested by the various HOWTOs. Players like xmms would just do nothing when I asked them to play an mp3. No error message, no crash, just: nothing. Eventually I tried playback with amarok and what do you know? It works. Something odd is going on here, maybe some day I will understand.

This would be my one knock against Fedora so far, and it isn't peculiar to Fedora 7. "Normal" people don't want to see a terminal window, or "become root," or run commands, or google error messages, or pipe something to grep and paste the output into a post on a forum, they just want it all to work when they want to hear their music. I guess Ubuntu still has a slight edge in this department.

I wanted to compile my own PHP with lots of goodies, as I have always done, and started running into and solving a series of errors with ./configure, starting with the slight problem that I had no compiler installed. This is to be expected, since the LiveCD gives you a minimal desktop environment. Finally I lost patience and tried doing PHP installation the yum way. Now I'm a believer. Adding support for extensions (like mysql) is also one-liner. (No, a two liner: one yum command, and one apache restart. Put both commands on one line if you want a one-liner ) So long wget/configure/make/make/install. It was a nice character-building experience.

Fedora 7 is 4.9 out of 5 stars. I love it.

Dagnamit I spoke too soon didn't I? While F7 works happily on my lappy (IBM R52, Celeron 1.7, 768Mb, i915 chipset .....) it has given me no end of grief on my desktop (AMD 2600, 1.5Gb, VIA chipset, FX5200 graphics ...).

Firstly it wouldn't upgrade because F7 wouldn't see the hard disk partitions. Apparently it's something to do with PATA drivers in F7 but I don't care, I just wanted a smooth upgrade. I tried creating an upgrade floppy with ATA kernel drivers but it didn't work either. So I blew FC6 away and installed F7 from scratch. It has taken me about a week to get wireless working (Belkin F5D7000 based on BCM4306 chip) and to be honest I'm not sure what I did to make it work in the end, I tried that many things. All of which had to be done via the shell because I can't 'startx'. I have an Nvidia FX5200 (3 or 4 years old now), which wouldn't work straight from the install; wouldn't work using Nvidia's proprietry drivers; wouldn't work with drivers from Freshrpms; and finally wouldn't work with drivers from ATrpms. I keep getting errors about invalid memory allocations. I don't know, I'm goddam sick of searching for the fix. I think the problem is with the VIA VT82xx chipset but can't find any relevant info / drivers on it. FC6 worked happily on there (including the Nvidia card working with zero extra effort), except I wanted to run VMware Server on there and never got it working - it installed and ran first time on my lappy with F7 but the desktop has better resources for handling virtual machines.

So I have had experiences from either end of the spectrum with F7 and plan on re-installing FC6 on the desktop, making do without VM's on there.

Yes, much more polish GUI interface. I don't use KDE, but Gnome is much nicer to look at. And Beryl even works much smoother in FC7 than FC6.

I do have some bugs and stability issues to work out, that I'm thinking may be related to VMWare, but I think all-in-all it's a nice upgrade.

I've always had a special place in my heart for Fedora

Maybe it's because I learned Linux with Fedora! Anyways, All my hardware was detected right away; hardware support is better than 6. Yum seems faster. Haven't had any problems so far... When I was dual booting with FC6 I was using Windows 40% and Fedora 60%...now It's 80% Fedora and 20% Windows (but I think that has to do A LOT with all the studying I've been doing...and all the help for this forum )