About Fedora 7. After two installs of the KDE desktop, I'm getting the GNOME version, which by all accounts, is the traditional Fedora desktop. There is a very nice review on Distrowatch:
From the initial boot of the installer the system exuded a sense of stability which filled me with confidence the more I used it. The installer is probably the best I have ever used and is very powerful while remaining simple to use. Top marks for that. Overall, the default GNOME install of Fedora is very good and (non-free software idiosyncrasies aside) as a Linux distribution in itself I thought it was excellent. If what you are after is a reliable, stable, easy-to-use yet powerful Linux distribution out of the box, then Fedora fits the bill nicely. Just be prepared to struggle a little if you need those cough cough non-free bits.
And though he says it is a bit of a struggle, that's overstating things a tad; I added the livna repository using Yum Extender (the front end for Yum, the Package Manager for Fedora) and it took a total of five minutes to do; it would have been quicker if I had just copy and pasted the instructions into a terminal.
The how to on setting up those non-free (mp3, other audio and video codecs) can be found here; it truly is easier to copy and paste the instructions--half the time I spent in the gui was searching for the various bits that needed to be installed, the actual download and compiling of the bits took around two minutes. Five minutes and you're golden.
If you look at the popular distros in the last two weeks or so, the ones that are shooting up are those that either have everything sorted on install (i.e., ready to play media files right away), or those where it is a minor thing to get them going; that and a superior installation experience--which Fedora 7, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and OpenSuse all have.
Interesting news from the Free Software Foundation to debunk the whole 'Linux killed my Tivo' nonsense going around; Richard Stallman explains in depth what the General Public License, version three is all about:
One major danger that GPLv3 will block is tivoization. Tivoization means computers (called "appliances") contain GPL-covered software that you can't change, because the appliance shuts down if it detects modified software. The usual motive for tivoization is that the software has features the manufacturer thinks lots of people won't like. The manufacturers of these computers take advantage of the freedom that free software provides, but they don't let you do likewise.
So Tivo is built using Linux, but they want to lock it down use a sneaky end-around on the GPL? Can't wait til those open source Tivo's hit the market.
I think I described before the revolution going on in storage devices--a four Gb flash drive smaller than your pinky finger on sale for only $75 US; well, the Japanese have started selling the Wizpy a four Gb flash device that is a media player (TurboLinux based) that can be used as a liveCD type device; it also includes a media player that can play music (ogg, wma, mp3) and video (xvid and mp4), has a voice recorder, a 1.7 inch screen and an FM tuner. But will it run Fedora? Serious question. And remember, Karma has no hands. And Karma doesn't want to me to post any more eye-candy youtube vids, or I would have been able to do so in the past week.