Fedora 16 Alpha is Released!

Well, the stubborn boys and gals :) working in the Fedora community has made the official announcement of the availability of the Fedora 16 Alpha 1 which the first step towards the upcoming Fedora 16. Fedora was actually one of the first distributions to include the Gnome 3.0 (yikes!) by default with the introduction of the current version 15.

Just like with Ubuntu where you have certain different desktop versions aimed at different users such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc, the Fedora team has ones of their own which they called "Fedora Spins". As usual, simultaneous to this release ISO images of Fedora spins are also updated and available for downloading too.


What's new?

This is an old screenshot from Fedora 15 actually :)...

*. Gnome 3.1.4: Yep the latest builds of the Gnome Shell and hopefully they'll ship the upcoming Gnome 3.2 (which brings some major features but in a way, "nothing will change", if you know what I mean) when it's officially released.

*. KDE 4.7 (comes with the separate KDE spin) :

Well, "thanks" to Gnome, the Qt written KDE desktop is getting more and more popular by each day it seems. Although KDE used have a shi* load of features in the past but with their version 4.0, the desktop is a bit heavily cleaned-up (which is a good thing, I think :/) and has one of the best eye-candy related stuff as well.

Fedora 16 alpha 1 also has the KDE plasma desktop edition for the Netbook users too.

*. LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the default office productivity suite which was also started to appear in Fedora with the current 15.0 version.

*. Firefox 6.0 is the default web browser (obviously). According to the developers + in my humble experience, the loading times specially of Firefox 6 in GNU/Linux feels a bit faster than with other versions and comes with few minor features + the usual bug fixes as well.

*. Impressive SELinux "version": According to their release page, this version of Fedora comes with an optimized SELinux (if you're a bit new, then SELinux is a software that manages "policies" inside your computer, sort of a firewall) that takes about 4 times lesser amount of time to install (including less memory consumption 38MB to 6MB!).

These are just the few of the main features of the Fedora 16 Alpha 1 and other things like GRUB2, enhanced virtuliazation support, GCC updates and a hell lot of individual application updates are also available as usual.

And if you want to try it out, then please visit this page for more. Good luck.