Although Fedora 8 just got released, the developers are thinking about the features which are going to be included in the next release, Fedora 9. There are no approved features yet, but the community is working on providing material for developers to choose from.
Let's take a look at nine of the proposed features for Fedora 9, with a few details about them:
1. New Gnome Display Manager - The users want an enhanced rewritten version of the fast and popular display manager, with better fast-user-switching, better ConsoleKit integration, the dynamical configuration of displays, and much more.
2. KDE 4 - They really, really want the fourth version of KDE included in Fedora and the Fedora KDE spin! KDE 4 will replace KDE 3, removing the KDE 3 installations from a given system. The packages containing games will meet some problems, because they were designed for KDE3, resulting in some conflicts and instability issues.
3. Fedora Astronomy Spin - It seems there are many astronomers and astrophysicists if a Live media spin (that fits on CD) was requested. At this moment there is no distribution which offers a set of professional open-source tools for astronomers and astrophysicists. Fedora would benefit a lot from such an option, extending its community to universities and to the fore-mentioned categories.
4. PackageKit - Some people recommend the distribution-neutral alternative package management front-end. It has no stable release yet, but it's under heavy development, so we could have one soon. It supports yum and other package management back-ends. If PackageKit is included, the package management in Fedora would be much easier.
5. RandR Support - The Xrandr extension is the modern interface shown by X servers for configuring devices like monitors, LCD screens etc. If this is introduced in Fedora 9, the distribution will have modern display configuration and hotplugging support, similar to Ubuntu's displayconfig-gtk.
6. Bluetooth enhancements - People want these so a better communication can be established between the computer and other devices with Bluetooth capabilities.
7. More NetworkManager - System wide NetworkManager integration is what the community wants. Features recommended for Fedora 9 are included in Fedora 8, so you will get a little bit used to them until the next release.
8. Presto - This will bring support for binary delta packages for updates. The main advantage would be the great amount of bandwidth and time saved. For this, there is some work to do on the yum-presto plugin, including it by default.
9. RPM and Yum Improvements - The enhancements might bring faster performance with less memory consumption, somewhere below 100MB for most cases if things go well.
These features could be the nine reasons to choose Fedora 9 when it will be released, hopefully with everything that's useful for all the types of users included. Until then, you should download Fedora 8 and try it out, maybe you'll fall in love with it.
You can download Fedora 8 right now from Softpedia.
