I'm closely watching the Fedora Project for the next release of Fedora Linux. Fedora 14 has been great, but what does the upcoming Fedora 15 have to offer? I downloaded the Fedora 15 Beta to find out.

As usual for testing a new Linux release, I installed this on a USB flash drive. While it's a little slow in running updates (that's due to the nature of flash) this is a great way to experiment with the Beta version without installing over my existing system. The install took about 20 minutes, from start to finish, using the Live CD. For those who are curious about the technical details, I manually partitioned the flash drive with a very plain layout, and let the installer encrypt my filesystem automatically.

The biggest difference is that Fedora 15 has upgraded to Gnome 3, which uses the new Gnome Shell interface. It's a change, for sure. But I quickly got over it, and after a few minutes it felt quite natural.