Top features of Fedora 11

I have been using Fedora for quite a while now and I never had such a smooth running fedora installation on my system. While I was installing Fedora 11 on my spare PC, its an old ACER desktop with primitive devices, I thought that it won't be able to run Fedora 11 properly. But to my surprise the installation was quick and now it works pretty well and fast. Till now, it has proved to be the best Fedora release for me.

I won't say that I haven't faced any problem with Fedora 11. Sometimes I have trouble running videos but I can't over look the overall performance of the system, its better than ever. The Fedora community included some great notable features in it which makes Fedora 11 by far the best release. Some of them are:

1) 20 second Startup:

The goal was to get to the login screen in 20 seconds and then to be as fast as possible after the login. And they did this pretty well, I get to the gnome-login screen in somewhere betweeen 21 and 23 seconds. Now, that's impressive !!

2) Ext4 file system

Ext4 is the latest official linux file system. Fedora 11 made Ext4 as their default filesystem. Ext4 is really good for servers, it can handle filesystems upto 1 EB (Exa byte) and upto 16 TB sized files. But it increases the overall performance of the disk by enabling better drive space management than ext3 and faster disk performance. So, even if you are not running a server you can benefit from ext4 by the overall increased speed of your system.

3) Better Graphics:

The X server is updated to 1.6 giving better graphics performance. A normal user might not be able to sense the improved graphics but there is a notable improvement while using multiple displays. 

4) Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 is available as the default browser in Fedora 11. It might not look like a huge improved feature but in other distros like Ubuntu it is still not available as the default browser. Since firefox 3.5 claims a lot of improvement in the browsing feature we can consider this as an overall improvement in browsing experience with Fedora 11.

For other features you can look the list of changes they have made in this new version. I hope now you can see why Fedora 11 is better than all of its predecessors. Way to go Fedora !!