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 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 features. Be sure to check out the Common Issues 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 a little more closely in the future.