A very early look at Fedora 15 through the 2/17/11 nightly build: It's surprisingly stable

What I'm saying is if you can't deliver basic functionality in an alpha release of the distribution you hope to deliver to end uses in two months time, maybe you should consider holding the troublesome features until the next release so you can provide a better user experience.

Fedora did this with systemd, which they could have put in Fedora 14 but instead chose to hold for Fedora 15. Debian is extremely conservative as to what they'll put in a Stable release. Testing is frozen very early, and development then focuses on eliminating bugs in those frozen packages.

And yes, Gnome Shell has had considerably more development than has Unity. Along with that "edge" in development, Fedora is releasing AFTER Ubuntu.

Fedora gets a reputation for being too "bleeding edge," and I am among those who have been burned by changes in Fedora mid-release. I left Fedora after F14 when I couldn't get my video to work. Now with the same hardware, F15 displays perfectly. And I don't think it's anything Fedora did; the bugs were fixed upstream.

I'm still not happy that Ubuntu made a big deal about pulling from Debian Testing instead of Unstable to create the 10.04 LTS, yet they pushed many new or newish features/services such as Ubuntu One and the Me Menu which clearly could benefit from a lot more development before going into a release that is supposed to last three years on the desktop. More care and more conservative package choice should be the guiding principles behind a release with such a long support life.

I'm sure that Ubuntu One and the Me Menu features have been improved for 10.10 and will be even more polished in 11.04, but that leaves LTS users to either turn off the features or be forced to jump on the six-month cycle to get better versions. Pulling from Debian Testing is just lip service if you're shoving a bunch of stuff on top of it that has not been through as careful a development process.

I want to like Ubuntu, I still use it on one machine, and I support many of the project's goals. But when Fedora seems more conservative in its releases, you know there's something that's not quite kosher. I don't think newbie users are well-served by such raw software.

I hope I'm wrong and Ubuntu 11.04 turns out to be a rock-solid, fast and functional release that gives those new to Linux the minimum of trouble. Of course, there's always Mint ...