Fedora 19 (Schrödinger's Cat) arrived earlier this week. This release missed the planned deadline by one week, as has traditionally happened with past releases. Nevertheless a seven days' delay is still manageable as compared to 2-3 weeks by which Fedora generally misses the mark. We've still not forgotten the two-and-a-half month delay in case of Fedora 18. The reason behind such delays is generally given to be focus on stability, which is a good thing for the end users because Fedora comes with “bleeding-edge” software—packages in their latest upstream versions at the time of release—and it's kind of imperative to ensure everything works and all regressions are ironed out.

The last Fedora I installed on my computer was F14 (Laughlin), released in end-2010. F14 was a pretty solid release, especially with its smooth KDE experience. Those were early days for GNOME 3, and I abhorred its user experience. A lot had drastically changed from v2, many things were only partially implemented, and a huge lot of things were just absent. At the time, using GNOME 3 was frustrating, to say the least. F19 comes with GNOME 3 as its default desktop, and so I had my apprehensions before giving it a try.