Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" released

> The X.org server has been rewritten to support 'hot' plugging and unplugging of GPUs. Specifically, this allows Fedora to provide better support for USB connected graphics devices exposed by many modern systems and laptop docking stations. The user is no longer required to restart the X.org server for such devices to be recognised.

Does anybody know if this means good things about the state of those nvidia/intel hybrid graphics setups?

Nautilus has had an overhaul, too many changes for me to list them all, but some of the more noticeable ones:

The separation of "Places" and "Bookmarks". It sounds reasonable, however you cannot modify what is in the Places menu, so even if the folder doesn't exist, you're stuck with it. I don't have a Videos folder, but I cannot remove it from the sidebar.

They've also removed the tree view from Nautilus, I used it all the time, but now it's gone. I need multiple windows to look at the contents of multiple folders at once.

I cannot make a new empty file directly inside Nautilus. I could understand if this had never existed , but not why they'd remove it now.

The App Menu, or whatever they're calling it, is confusing. Nautilus has a button on the toolbar which seems to cover half of the options, and uses the App Menu for the remaining options.

The Connect To Server dialog has been changed, for no reason as far as I can tell. It now only has a text box for entering the URI, no easy-to-use Protocol/Server/Port/Username/Password sections.

Typing to locate a file will no longer take you to that file, but instead start a search. I personally hate this, although I could understand why some may prefer this.

In terms of system configuration, they've stripped a bunch of options out, again.

I can no longer enable horizontal scrolling using my touchpad.

You can no longer select a background image which is outside of the root Pictures folder (Non-recursive). You cannot even specify a different folder.

You cannot specify the background scaling (Zoom seems to be the default, no tiling, or centering etc.)

Problems with are still around: The printer configuration is still a disaster - they seem unable to make it work correctly with networked printers. Space in the name? You're screwed.

Still cannot easily disconnect from a wireless network (although the option is there, it's not easy: All Settings -> Network -> Wireless -> click on little arrow next to network name -> Disconnect)

Having said all of that, it's still better than Unity (IMO).

Have you looked at openSUSE, and specifically openSUSE Tumbleweed[1]?

* systemd

* apparmor[2]

* RPMs + One Click Install[3]

* YaST[4]

For what it's worth, I have been using Tumbleweed for quite a while now and the last two upgrades (11.4 > 12.1 > 12.2) have been unproblematic, the 12.1 > 12.2 one went without even a single conflict or problem.

[1]: http://en.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed -- Tumbleweed has been initiated Greg Kroah-Hartman (Greg KH) while working at SUSE and he continues as the maintainer, even after leaving SUSE for the Linux Foundation. Note that Tumbleweed is basically a rolling release but based on the current stable version, which means you update normally upon a new distro release and over time updated packages (Kernel/KDE/Gnome/XFCE etc. etc.) are being added as they are being submitted into Factory, the development branch.

[2]: Unfortunately, though SELinux is a work-in-progress right now: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SELinux

[3]: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install

[4]: Yast lets you use a GUI for a number of things like adding users, setting up servers, runlevels(!) etc. I see many people disliking it, but I am unsure why. It is nice to have sometimes, but at no point are you ever forced to use it, in fact, editing configs directly works just as well.

P.S.: You can of course also run openSUSE factory straight away, it often works, however, since that is where development happens, things might break. This is much the same as Fedora Rawhide, and it might (or might not happen) that someone on a given day breaks something essential (like say...systemd). So consider yourself warned! ;)

edit: formatting & added fluffing to Factory explanation!

Can anyone with experience comment on the number of regressions each release of Fedora compared to Ubuntu? Many of them aren't the distros fault of course, but I'm looking for something up to date with a bit more focus on QA.

I heard it first originally as an engineering joke. And also horses instead of cows.

You know you're an engineer when: You'll assume a horse is spherical in order to make a math easier.

Funnier with horses. Horses are less spherical. They way they industrially force feed and force breed cows these days, spherical is actually not that ironic an approximation to make. More sad than funny.