Think of this as a little general pre-overview and a place to post your impressions and discuss some things if you want. I know there's a Distro Reviews section here at LQ, but that would require too much technical details and I didn't want to go into that now.
I had Fedora 14 live cd, I decided to install it few days ago so that I can try F15 (GNOME 3 especially) by means of an upgrade. I only added Google Chrome and Adobe repos, then I updated F14, 400 and something updates, all well. Then I upgraded it by means of a
preupgrade package, if necessary do;
Code:
yum install preupgrade
1141 upgrades, all well. Reboot, all well. That was one of the smoothest upgrades I ever had. Lovelock is mean, clean and lean. And that is because of GNOME 3 too.
My machine is Toshiba Satellite, 4 years old with Intel 945GM graphics, Pentium Dual Core 1.6 GHz and Atheros wireless. That all works great. In case you might have some problems, there's a Classic GNOME available to choose on the Login Screen. If your card can't handle new GNOME the switch will happen automagically. I've tried GNOME 3 before, but only in the live session, now, for me, new GNOME is pretty cool. It may take a little time to get used to it, but if you like simplicity I think you won't have any problems. Lot's of things are different, but if you want to add/tweak some settings install
gnome-tweak-tool package available in the repos. When I logged in into my GNOME 3 desktop, there was 146 MB of RAM in use with System Monitor running.
Packages are all pretty newest, lovely 2.6.38.6 kernel and many others. What is really lovely is the boot and shutdown process. I'll just say it's fast.
One of the reasons that is so is because;
Quote:
systemd is a system and service manager, replacement for SysVinit and Upstart. After a six months shift, during which it has been more granularly tested, Fedora 15 brings in, by default, a new system daemon whose code is designed from scratch, with the objective to take the maximum advantage offered by modern Linux kernels. With systemd, Fedora 15 boots-up faster, particularly on SSD; native systemd service configuration files (or units) are much easier to understand and configure compared to sysvinit scripts, as systemd uses.
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Another lovely feature is;
Quote:
Fedora 15 has a /run directory for storing runtime data. /run is now a tmpfs, and /var/run is bind mounted to it. /var/lock is bind mounted to /run/lock. Applications can use /run the same way as /var/run. Several programs including udev, dracut, mdadm, mount and initscripts used hidden directories under /dev for runtime data during early bootup before /var is mounted. However /dev/ is supposed to be used for only device nodes and there is consensus between major distributions to shift to using /run instead. Fedora 15 is leading this change. Details including the benefits are explained here.
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There are many other changes of course and if you want to read about them, Fedora 15 "Lovelock" release notes are already up;
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...tes/index.html With lovely tips and tricks, too.
And if you are going to upgrade, then visit Upgrade;
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading
And PreUpgrade;
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
This was as I said before, just a little pre-overview based on my experience, made with and because of lovely impressions that F15 left on me and in hope that it will be useful to someone.
Congratulations to developers and contributors!
F15 is going to be released tomorrow.
Thanks for reading!