Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released 62
JonRob writes "The first development snapshot of Fedora 9 (Sulphur) has been released, providing both a KDE and a GNOME live CD. This is the first of three test releases before the final version of Fedora 9 this April. The alpha features many changes including KDE 4 by default, GNOME 2.21.4, support for creation of encrypted partitions and for resizing EXT2/EXT3/NTFS partitions during install, speed improvements to X, the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, and much more."
That's way below what they expect to perform well. (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll note that their target machine for X11 2d desktop performance [fedoraproject.org] is a 1.7GHz Pentium M with a Radeon 7500, which they say is "not fast and therefore a good target for tuning." I miss the days when you could expect- out of the box- to get good desktop performance on your 400MHz Pentium II and have a ~1.5GB install footprint (or less if you bothered deselecting stuff you didn't need on install). Now endless tweaking and tuning and putzing with stuff is required to get poor (rather than abysmal) performance on something 2-3 times that fast using 2-3 times the space. There's really been about as much proportional bloat in Linux distros since the RH 6.x days as there has been in corresponding Windows versions up to Vista.