I upgraded one of my machines to Fedora 10 last month, and for me, this release lacks the “wow” appeal that other releases have had. A minor annoyance is that the keyboard repeat delay [is broken](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=475747) for me and so far, there is no fix other than disabling keyboard repeat. On the plus side, Fedora 10 includes OpenOffice.org 3 and other [new](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/ReleaseSummary) [features](http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/features/print/112093). Be sure to check out the [Common Issues](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F10Common) people have experienced with Fedora 10.
The other day, a co-worker handed me an OpenSolaris 11 Live CD. I booted it, expecting to be underwhelmed like I was with the Solaris 10 JavaDesktop. I was pleasantly surprised, however. Sun’s “Nimbus” GNOME theme knocks the socks off of the boring Fedora window manager themes. The experience felt like I was running Linux. It was responsive, supported my newer hardware, and the system was built with GNU utilities on the command line so I get my favourite options to ‘ls’, ‘grep’, etc. It supported my NVidia card out-of-the box, and had Compiz eye-candy as an option. The only thing I missed (in my superficial test) was the familiar ‘yum’ and ‘rpm’ for package management. I suspect that if I used it from day to day, I’d find other things I miss. Does OpenSolaris support encrypted file systems? Does it have as much optional software as I can get with Fedora Extras?
I’ll keep my eye on [OpenSolaris](http://www.opensolaris.com/) a little more closely in the future.