OSNews

Stability
As I've said above, FC2 in my experience was a bug-ridden mess. Maybe it was just me. Ever since I installed FC3 Final, system has not crashed once, I even have the closed-source Nvidia drivers installed and my favorite games seem to work faster than they did prior.

SELinux is back, and this time it's a default. It's easy to turn off, and turning it off was the first thing I did. I might be willing to give it a shot, but with FC3 Test 2 and Test 3, it sometimes made my system unbootable and would give error messages as I booted, Same thing it did with FC2. No thanks, if it takes that long to fix it, I don't want it.

Bugs/Problems/Rants
FC3 isn't exactly perfect. My first complaint is not directed to the Fedora team, because they don't control it, but instead to the folks that work on Gnome and KDE. I like both, and I don't favor one over the other. Last week I was using primarily Gnome, this week I am using strictly KDE. I don't know what I will be using next week. Anyway, my complaint is that KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.8 has changed little, if at all, from their predecessors. KDE 3.3 should've probably been named 3.2.4, and Gnome 2.8 seems more like a 2.6.x release if anything else. Don't get me wrong, they are both great, but if you only have the prior versions, you're not missing much.

When it comes to the Fedora team, I feel a great aspect to improve would be the look and feel. Most of the themes, icons, and widgets are the same you can get in any distro, except for Bluecurve but if you like that one, I am sure you can probably download it or import it into any distro. Regardless, KDE and Gnome are opensource. Fedora could really make an original, raw-looking desktop if they wanted to. (We will probably have bluecurve based themes for the next few versions at least). Other things in this department that could use touching up, would be the Bootup screen (this is the third Fedora release to use the same boot screen) and adding a shutdown screen, maybe even a cooler looking login screen.

Conclusion
Even though I have a few small complaints, the complaints I do have aren't really the most important you will ever read. Most importantly, my system hasn't crashed since test 2. It looks like the focus of FC3 was to include the latest Gnome, KDE, Selinux, xorg, and Evolution, but stability was definitely a goal, for the first time since FC2 I can depend on my Linux PC again. Despite minor complaints, Fedora is my main distro again. Stability is the main thing I've been wanting, and I finally recieved it. If any of you try it, I hope you find it as stable.

In closing, I'd like to bring up one last point. My largest dissapointment with Fedora is that it may never defeat Microsoft. As you all know, it is the testing ground for new technologies that may make it to Redhat Enterprise Linux. I highly doubt we'll ever see it in a shiny box next to Windows on store shelves giving casual users a choice, instead it is mostly limited to those with broadband and a burner, or a generous friend with a burner and DSL. If a distro is to truly challenge Microsoft, sadly it won't be Fedora that pulls it off. That's okay to me though, because I know how to navigate FTP mirrors very well, but your average "Joe User" probably doesn't know what "FTP" actually means. Will Linux take the Microsoft throne? I surely hope so, it will be a number of years before Longhorn is released, and I hope Linux vendors take advantage.