Fedora 18 is go for release

The Fedora team did a major rewrite of the installer, put in an in place upgrade tool (ironically called fedup) that is actually supposed to work consistently, and generally made a lot of changes in this release. Rather that be slaves to a hard and fast date like some distributions that start with the letter U and release a buggy mess they decided to wait until they had a solid product. Kudos to the Fedora developers for doing this the right way.

Both of these tools are huge for Fedora, and they are worth the wait.

@Steven, have you tried the new Anaconda? Do you feel it is an improvement over the older version?

The new Anaconda looks nicely polished and makes a good impression, but it is a first release and still has some rough edges.

For example, if you have an existing partition that you want to overwrite with a fresh installation, the way to do that is not at all clear. I ended up removing the target partition manually and let Anaconda create it fresh. That worked fine.

I'm sure there will be time before the next release to make some usability tweaks.

I haven't done a Fedora install in awhile. I did a bunch of CentOS, Scientific Linux and Stella installs recently, and that reminded me why I love Anaconda.

Best features of Anaconda (for me, anyway) that I wish Debian and Ubuntu had:

-- Create fully encrypted LVM installation without using the whole disk -- Encrypt individual partitions either in LVM or with standard partitioning and use a single passphrase, entered a single time, for multiple encrypted partitions

I hope they didn't screw this up ...