Hardly ever has a Linux distribution raised such a mixed feelings as the Fedora has done for us. On the other hand it represents the most up-to-date software and has some cool innovations, and is backed by one of the biggest Linux contributors – RedHat. However, the out-of-the-box experience of Fedora is far behind the other leading desktop distributions (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva..) which leaves me wondering that who is this Linux distro for? We decided to give the Fedora 11 ‘Leonidas’ a whirl and try to find out.

The initial impression of Fedora is very good – the new Plymouth boot scheme loads the system up very quickly, and without any flickering or unnecessary ‘geek talk’ shown on the screen. Instead there is a simplistic animation of the Fedora logo which greets you prior to the login screen – this gives a nice touch to the distribution. The post-boot visuals are not bad either, and Fedora comes with a pleasant dark blue tone and is one of the better looking desktops on the Linux market.

As the headline suggests,  Fedora comes with the very latest stuff that the world of free software has to offer. But unfortunately the edge leaves the distro bleeding on the release date. The included Firefox version is 3.5 beta 4, which means that a number of Firefox add-ons will not work on day 1, until the Firefox 3.5 is out and add-ons updated. Also the configuration of the browser leaves a bit to be desired, as it doesn’t have clue what to do with many common file formats, such as .PDF files as an example. Hell, even the “Open containing folder”-feature in the Firefox download manager asks for the associated helper application.

Fedora is also one of the more strict distributions regarding the licensing of the software components. This means that no support for proprietary formats (such as the MP3) is included, and neither is Adobe Flash for the browser. The former disadvantage is however tackled quite nicely with the automatic codec finder that finds, downloads and installs the required software for media playback. Installing Adobe Flash on the other hand required a visit to the command line interface.

After spending a few days with the installation and configuring the system for our personal preferences we found ourselves using the command line way more than we have with Ubuntu, openSUSE and other new user oriented desktops. Luckily Fedora has some excellent documentation and communities online, which makes finding support very easy – I would say Fedora is second best in this field, only topped by Ubuntu.

So who should use Fedora? As a bleeding edge and short life cycle distribution, it is hardy the ideal server environment. It offers a very nice desktop environment, but requires a bit more manual tuning than some of the competition. Performance wise it is very typical, with similar system resource consumption that Ubuntu and others. FOSS purists will enjoy the fact that no proprietary code is included. Overall I would recommend Fedora to someone who has already learned the basics of Linux and can do a bit of work on the command line. The relation to RedHad is a terrific asset for anyone interested in learning Linux for a professional career, as RedHat / CentOS has a lot of commercial and corporate users. If you are looking for the quick jump from Windows to Linux, you should probably look elsewhere.

You can grab your copy from: fedoraproject.org