The Best Features Of Fedora 19, Schrödinger's Cat

Fedora 19, codenamed Schrödinger's Cat, should finally be released next week. For those still contemplating whether or not to try out the new release candidate, here's a look at some of the best Fedora 19 features.

There was a ton of Fedora 19 Linux feature proposals, most of which ended up getting developed and worked out for making a very exciting Fedora 19 release. Perhaps best of all is that the release schedule only slipped once and that Fedora 19 final this time around is only coming one week late, if everything goes according to plan in the next few days. The close-to-on-time release alone is a huge improvement compared to in the past where Fedora has rarely shipped on time and has even been delayed by months.

For an idea for some of the best Fedora 19 features, below is a list of some of the changes I find most interesting for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

- The Anaconda installer for Fedora 18 was a complete mess after its installer user-interface was redone. With Fedora 19, Anaconda is no longer a big mess but is much better than in its preceding release.

- Cloud images for use on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are now "first class citizens" and in much better standing than in the past.

- Fedora 18 is one of the first major tier-one Linux distributions shipping the GCC 4.8 compiler by default. GCC 4.8 has a whole lot of improvements from faster performance for some workloads to better instruction set coverage on new processors and full C++11 support. The exciting GCC 4.8 stuff was covered in an earlier Phoronix article.

- GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma 4.10, and MATE 1.6 are among the Linux desktop environment options available on Fedora 19. GNOME 3.8, of course, is the default desktop environment for Fedora Linux 19.

- RPM 4.11 is now in use for package management and it brings better performance, lower memory usage, better file conflict detection, and other improvements.

- MySQL has been replaced by MariaDB, following the move of various other Linux distributions.

- All of the latest upstream systemd improvements have wound up in Fedora.

Other features for the Fedora 19 Linux release can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki. The final release of F19 Schrödinger's Cat is planned for the 2nd of July.