Distrowatch: From Fedora 9 to OpenSUSE 11

[Pascal Calarco]

The Distrowatch editor has been using Fedora 9 since release and is now 
moving over to try out SUSE 11.0.  He makes a few comments about Fedora 9:

"Before taking a first look at Novell's community distribution, let me 
start with a few remarks on Fedora's last two releases. It seems to be a 
trend among Linux distributions that an excellent release is often 
followed by a mediocre one. It's as if the distribution developers 
became complacent after one or two successful versions, thinking that 
nothing could possible go wrong six months down the line. As such, they 
get more adventurous, make wrong decisions, and add experimental 
features, the combination of which is often disastrous. With Fedora 9, I 
feel that the developers have negated all the great work they had done 
with previous 2 - 3 releases and went overboard with bleeding-edge 
software and features. No wonder Fedora 9 received barely a lukewarm 
reception by most reviewers, while many users were much less kind in 
their choice of words when describing their own experiences.

My sentiments are no different from those expressed in many recent 
reviews. Fedora 8 was possibly the project's best release to-date - 
certainly not without its problems, but generally trouble-free, 
especially after the first waves of post-release bug fixes and software 
updates were applied to the distribution. On the other hand, Fedora 9 
barely qualifies as a stable release. The decision to provide KDE 4 as 
the only KDE desktop was a painfully wrong one, particularly at the time 
when the vocal Fedora KDE team has been campaigning hard to convince the 
Linux community that Fedora was not a GNOME distro any more. And 
shipping a version of X.Org that did not work with any of the 
proprietary NVIDIA drivers also must have cost the distribution a few 
users."

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080623#feature

   - pascal