Initial impressions after upgrading my laptop to Fedora 7 (from Fedora 6):
- I was initially going to comment that the system feels a lot slower and the keyboard sometimes goes nuts, but then I realised that both are due to my copying many gigs of data back onto the system from my backups. My laptop has the endearing quality of having keyboard IO go crazy when it's busy enough.
- I also used some of the new package manager stuff, and in my zeal to remove gnome-pilot and mono, accidentally removed gnome (there are plenty of stupid dependencies in the package tree in Fedora. Still. Grr.) It took me a moment to figure out that this was what happened when my guest logins were suddenly KDE.
- Something changed in the kernel and my hard drive is /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda. I am not amused.
- It's pretty. It initially *feels* cooler than FC6 (which was also pretty), but that may just be novelty. I can't guarantee that novelty would make switching to FC6 from FC7, once I'm used to it, also feel cooler.
- gdm has its account browser back on by default. This is the way I like it, but I wish the RedHat engineers would make up their mind and stop turning it on or off every few releases. I like seeing the defaults (at least partly because I end up installing Fedora onto a fair number of computers I don't administer and sometimes help people with those installs). Gratuitous change isn't really a good thing.
- Fast user switching. It works well. It's basically an interface to starting another X (which I've known how to do for quite some time) and nicely swapping between them with login names associated with each session, but it's more convenient and automates some stuff relating to the screensaver that previously had to be done manually.
- The power management looks to be a bit more polished.
- It detected my screen resolution correctly with no tweaking this time. Cool.
