Fedora 9 Beta review

In one sentence: so far so amazing! It’s now stable and completely usable. I now have a workable F9 system ( rawhide ) which I use daily. No more F8!!! Though we have yet ( one week ) to see the final artwork, but it’s still amazing. Some of the things I really like about F9 are:

-PackageKit: an amazing and fast front-end for yum. Specially mixed with yum 3.2.13, which has a policy that can be set to only download the best possible architecture for you beloved CPU :) what are those junk i386 packages when you can have the x86_64 ones? And I love the Package-Kit applet which shows up in the panel so you don’t have to worry about when something is finished or even worse, having some windows open while you don’t need them ( update windows ) It will notify you when the thing you’re doing is finished!

-Firefox 3: very natural look, I just love it. Bookmarking couldn’t get easier, especially for a bookmark-worm like me! And it’s faster, but the downfall is that it’s still Beta 5, not final!! but on the hand, it’s stable :)

-World Clock applet: Now I can easily have different time zones in my hand. It’s very handy when you want to call somewhere you have no idea what the time zone and you don’t have enough time ( lazyness? ) to look it up!

-New artwork ( seen this one but still out of rawhide ): Simply I like the Sulphur ( ph not f ) artwork, it looks nice :)

P.S. and I might not have cleared myself, but you have the choice of policies in yum whether you want the best possible architecture only to be installed or all of the architectures to be installed!