I have been using Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, since day one back in September 2003 when Red Hat split its commercial Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Back then, people hated Red Hat for this move, but businesses soon learned to love RHEL and Linux fans grew to love Fedora. But, then along came GNOME 3.x, Fedora’s default desktop choice, and it all changed.
GNOME 3.2, which was Fedora 16’s desktop, was dreadful. You don’t have to trust me on that though, just ask Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder. He hated GNOME 3.2.
That was then. This is now. Fedora 17, with the ungainly name Beefy Miracle-no I’m not making that up, that really is its name-is now in late beta and it’s much better than it was.