Another six months, another Fedora release. Apparently I still couldn't resist the temptation of upgrading, given I got a few days of flu-related downtime. Happy to report it's a pretty smooth release, with most things in the expected places:

  • GNOME is a tiny bit cleaner than it used to be, which is as expected, given that's what it's been doing for the last 5 releases. Apparently next time it'll be something completely different. I don't know if I should be excited or apprehensive about that..
  • PulseAudio continues to improve - however, I could swear I've successfully used a Bluetooth headset with Skype earlier, and now audio gets stuck if I pair a headset. That's not the most typical use case, of course, and for the most part, audio no longer sucks on Linux. Too bad my laptop's built-in microphone does suck (don't know if that's with Linux or in general), so I do need a headset to make Skype calls.
  • Apparently Empathy is approaching a usable IM now that it's made the default. Still slightly prematurely, IMO, and I will continue to use Pidgin with all its warts for the time being.
  • OpenOffice still works as expected, which is to say, slowly, but reasonably predicably.
  • I can get rid of many of the hacks I've done to make multihead work as I like without setting it up every time, because now Xorg does that by default. Yippee!
  • Evolution still continues to gain one or two major regressions per release, and lose none of the earlier. The tally now seems to be: brken live search, fkdup IMAP sync, scrwy calendaring, and, as an additional feature, automatically selecting the wrong recipient address out of several available emails despite being repeatedly told otherwise. Seriously, the thing needs to be taken behind the shed and shot to the head. And I need to find a decent email program. Thunderbird 2 wasn't that - and 3 still isn't done. Sigh.
  • Google Chromium is about 10x faster than Firefox, and by far the easiest way to install a 32 bit browser (working Flash!) on a 64 bit OS (I should probably reinstall to 32 bits all around, this bits thing doesn't help me do anything better).
That concludes my "yes, I'm a Linux geek" postings for the next six months, I guess. :)