I again skipped the last 2 Fedora releases on my laptop as I was worried that, the instability to new functionality ratio would be too high. I took the plunge with Fedora 14 though as the Intel i915 video drivers seem to have stabilised a lot lately, and it seems there will be lots of change in F15. I installed to a new partition rather than upgrading the existing F11, both to have a fall back and to help eliminate cruft.

I've also finally decided to leave SELinux enabled, to see can I endure the annoyance. For example here is what I had to do to allow apache to serve from a directory under my user's home dir, which is surely a very common requirement.

setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs=1
chcon --reference=/var/www ~/mydir
restorecon -R ~/mydir
chmod a+x ~ # not SELinux related, but allow apache process traverse my $HOME

So after a couple of weeks use, here is my review compared to Fedora 11.
In summary, things are getting a lot better!

The good

• Display performance on my Intel 915GM laptop is much improved (back to F8 preformance). I can now leave general.smoothScroll enabled in firefox for example. Also the compiz window manager is usable (even though I consider it useless)
• bug 475585 is finally fixed! There are no intermittent suspends, immediately after a resume when on battery
• Font rendering defaults to 96DPI and so there are no issues with spacing etc.
• Reading from a PIO2 compact flash at 801kB/s no longer adds huge latency to the system
• Nautilus defaults to "single window" mode, rather than the silly window per directory
• Nautilus can again browse dirs with names with invalid encoding. It still shows the silly "(invalid encoding)" beside them though.
• The add/remove software GUI (gpk-application) has improved a lot, although it doesn't integrate with installs/updates done from the command line with yum or rpm
• Firefox 3.6.10 and Thunderbird 3.1.6 are included

The bad

• gnome-terminal prompts about "running processes" when I close it (F11 did the same). This really should have an option in the GUI to disable, as I often have processes with no state running like viewing man pages or an ssh session etc., so I have to disable that with: gconftool-2 --set -t bool /apps/gnome-terminal/global/confirm_window_close false
• The switch to man-db broke my setup using vim to browse man pages. There are work arounds though.
• When the back-light starts to dim on idle, you must wait the 5 seconds or so for the sequence to complete, before one can hit a key to refresh the screen
• LCD backlight brightness is set to 50% on battery. That's too dark for me, so to set brightness to 75% (i.e. dim by 25%), use: gconftool-2 --set -t integer /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/brightness_dim_battery 25. Thanks to Chris Siebenmann for that tip
• The indicator shown when changing screen brightness gets out of sync for 1 keystroke when you change direction
• Subpixel font smoothing is still not enabled by default for my LCD
• Font hinting is a bit messed up. I choose "medium" which gives good rendering both with my "Monospace 8" terminal font and with "Verdana" in my browser. With "full" (which I think is selected automatically when you select subpixel smoothing) fonts in general were too thin. I would select "slight", which would fix alignment issues in characters like ⨷ and give consistent the horizontal and vertical strokes in characters like 員, especially at small sizes, but that gives a large drop in the readability of my terminal font
• Firefox still starts up offline if the network is down, so I can't access http://localhost/ for example. Use toolkit.networkmanager.disable setting in about:config to disable this feature
• Firefox 3 has display artifacts which should be fixed by the new layer engine in Firefox 4 (F15)
• Keyboard shortcuts set on standard window manager still aren't used by compiz. Even defaults are different (Alt-F10 is just maximise, not toggle maximise)

The ugly

• Anaconda didn't update my grub.conf (Fedora 11 had the same issue). Instead it overwrote it and set the Fedora 11 partition I selected to be chain loaded. Tricky enough to work around, requiring UUID lookup and grub config editing
• As in Fedora 8, if the HDD password is enabled in the BIOS, reads from the hard disk fail after resume