In my Fedora 14 review I mentioned that I would skip Fedora 15 due to the many changes planned. Well I got a new sandy bridge laptop on which the display wasn't supported by Fedora 14, so I decided to take the plunge with Fedora 15 for which RC3 was declared gold the day my laptop arrived.

So after a couple of weeks of use and tweaking, here is my review compared to Fedora 14.
In summary, lots of change, and lots of tweaking required to get a useable environment.
Also, I see BTRFS is being earmarked for Fedora 16, so Fedora 17 should be a good release if you're looking for stability. I'm not picking on BTRFS particularly, it's just people will have more time to concentrate on polish rather than features.

The good

• My new sandy bridge laptop is fairly well supported
• Firefox 4, LibreOffice 3.3, GCC 4.6 and Python 3.2 are included
• Surprisingly systemd hasn't gotten in the way yet. For example to enable ssh access I did the normal:

  chkconfig sshd reset
  service sshd start
  system-config-firewall
    # uncheck sshd, check sshd, click apply

The bad

• The installer has NTFS resize support but it's not really usable, due to reporting the existing size as 0. I resorted to using gparted from a sysrescuecd live image
• I can't seem to add applets to the panel. I also didn't notice any updates notification in the panel, even though there was a kernel update available
• gnome 3 really is a big change, and one of the most annoying things is that many of the configuration options have been removed. Things like enabling subpixel antialising of fonts for LCDs for example. Most of these are handled by installing gnome-tweak-tool. It doesn't have options though for "sloppy focus" which is one of the main advantages of using an overlapping window manager. To set that I used gconftool-2 --set -t string /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode sloppy
• There are frequent very noticeable stalls with the sandy bridge GPU, which can be seen for example, sometimes when gnome shell presents the exposé like view of the running windows. There is a fix available as of 2.6.38.8-34
• I needed to manually install the iwl6000g2b-firmware package to enable my Wireless-N 1030 (8086:008a)). Note iwl6000g2a-firmware was already installed?
• gnome-terminal prompts about "running processes" when I close it (F14 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
• Firefox still starts up offline if the network is down, so I can't access http://localhost/ for example. The firefox 3 toolkit.networkmanager.disable setting in about:config to enable this feature is now network.manage-offline-status in Firefox 4
• Wireless is slow to connect after a resume. This is due to IPv6 being enabled now by NetworkManager. To disable that go to network settings → wireless → options → IPv6 Settings → Ignore
• Keyboard shortcuts are confusing to change. One must click directly on the text representing the current combination, and even then you must click quickly multiple times to allow changing the current key conbination
• Some entries in /proc/mounts are listed twice, hence df lists some file systems twice
• The file name "edit box" is not displayed in Nautilus, so one can't rename files, or name new folders. This was fixed promptly with an update from upstream
• Sandy bridge performance counters are not supported, requiring a patch to support PEBS (make bzImage)
• There is visible tearing with video, for example with mplayer playing an MPEG2 VOB file at only 10% CPU. Here is a patch to enable triple-buffered pageflips which may help
• Security updates are being installed without my permission, thus replacing my patched kernel for example. gpk-prefs allows one to disable this feature
• There is a few second delay when apps using sound exit, due to waiting on futexes
• The new systemd and gnome-shell components are very memory hungry:

  # ps_mem.py | tail -n10
  
   Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used    Program
  
    3.8 MiB +   3.3 MiB =   7.1 MiB    httpd (9)
    9.7 MiB + 848.5 KiB =  10.6 MiB    Xorg
   21.6 MiB +  95.0 KiB =  21.6 MiB    systemd
  239.5 MiB +   2.7 MiB = 242.2 MiB    gnome-shell

The ugly

• Working with (caching) files over 1.8G causes kswapd0 to use 100% CPU, which in turn triggers other instability after a while
• Auto LCD back-light dimming is just crazy. Dimmed far too much after resume, and seems to dim randomly otherwise. I completely disabled dimming for now
• The unused hard drive in my laptop spins up and stays spinning once I connect the A/C power adapter. My laptop is silent until this happens
• The alps touchpad on my Dell 15r laptop is not detected correctly, and acts like a normal mouse, without scroll area etc. There is a 6 month old kernel patch available though (make bzImage)
• Middle mouse button emulation is not enabled, which is needed for laptops which generally only have two buttons. This to my surprise is a gnome 3 setting which is disabled by default‽ To enable use gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse middle-button-enabled true
• memtest 4.1 is included on the live image, not 4.2 and the former hangs on sandy bridge laptops