Fedora is without doubt one of the most prolific Linux distributions around. In the span of only 5 years, the Fedora Project has already unleashed 10 major versions of Fedora.

I’ll confess, i used to like installing new versions of Linux. I used to find it exciting, starting up into a new system, with a new look. Unfortunately, the excitement tends to wear off when you realise biggest difference between many versions of Linux is the desktop background.

Fedora 11 provides a sneak peak at what's coming in the more staid and stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux. During tests, eWEEK Labs found that the biggest improvements in Fedora 11 come in the area of virtualization, although Fedora still lags systems from VMware in functionality and polish.

When you're talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical's Ubuntu, Novell's openSUSE and Red Hat's Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S.

While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

With the final release of Fedora 8 last Thursday, I decided to perform a simple experiment with four distributions. I'd boot them on my two Gateway notebooks. I didn't want to try anything fancy or complicated. I just wanted to see if they'd boot up to their default graphical desktop.

Ubuntu regularly claims to be the most popular Linux distribution. But, if so, Fedora is a competitive second. Both have thriving communities and are a major source of free and open source software innovation. But how do the distributions really compare?

With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva.

eWEEK Labs' tests show that Fedora 12 will provide the latest and greatest versions of popular open-source applications, as well as features that strengthen not only Fedora but also Linux distributions in general