The Fedora Project Team announced yesterday, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1.

Fedora 17 GNOME beta, as well as the beta of the KDE, LXDE and Xfce Spins, were released yesterday – almost two weeks past due date. This, however, is not highly unusual for the Fedora project. Unlike Ubuntu, their release schedule is not cast in concrete. They are more interested in getting stuff that works out the door, instead of shoving something out to meet a set deadline.

Here are some screenshots of the Fedora 13 release using the Gnome(default) desktop environment. The screenshots focus on the new Fedora 13 installer and various areas of the desktop.

There has not been a new development release of Fedora 12 since the Constantine Alpha release back in August. However, the second and last development release, Fedora 12 Beta, is set to be released next week. It has been delayed a few times already, but Fedora 12 Beta packs all of the features that are to be found in Fedora 12 with the final development freeze already in effect.

Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today's Fedora 11 Beta release.

Short review of Fedora 10 beta released a week ago. "Fedora 10 comes loaded with GNOME-2.24 which provides many robust desktop applications. The prominent change is the inclusion of Empathy instant messenger which supports gtalk(voice and video), yahoo and several other IM protocols..."

The Fedora project has announced the availability of the Fedora 11 beta release. Fedora 11 includes several compelling new features such as support for kernel modesetting, Ext4 by default, and faster boot time.

What's new in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 2? Well, the most important feature of this second beta release is the brand-new GNOME 2.30 desktop environment, which brings lots and lots of new and exciting features that will make Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a good-looking and modern operating system.

The Fedora 13 beta contains more enhancements that many users will ever know. That is not necessarily undesirable, because users will still benefit and many do not care to know. However, if Fedora 13 is remembered for anything, it may be for the same reason that its rival, Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx is remembered -- as the release in which commercialization became embedded in the free desktop.