So I had Fedora 11 installed for a few weeks...

The install program created overlapping partitions which required manual intervention.

I have an Intel video chipset and I ran into the screen blanking bug and several other bugs as mentioned in the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs list. It would also lock solid after about a day.

And then to top it all off the Fedora Mirrors recently had a major package upgrade issue which left their package mirrors inconsistent and un-useable for i386 upgrades.

Fedora maintains strict OSS purity at the expense of useability.

In years past I would hack, fiddle and coerce to get the system I wanted but these days in the Linux world I believe things should Just Work™

It's a shame that Fedora eventually becomes a stable product in the Redhat distribution by which point it has become totally boring/corporate.

So now it's back to Ubuntu 9.04 and it's plain to see the reason why it has such traction among desktop users. I still have niggles with Ubuntu but overall it provides a better user experience.

It's nice to be prompted to download a codec when attempting to listen to an MP3 and within moments you are away.

So if you are after the easiest mainstream Linux desktop experience go Ubuntu.