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About a week ago, Fedora 9, codename Sulphur was released to the public. Fedora 9 comes with a lot of new features and updated softwares such as the latest Gnome 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.4.2, Mozilla Firefox Beta 5, Open Office 2.4 and a 2.6.25 based kernel. Here are some of reviews about Fedora 9 that I have found over the internet.

Linux.com conclude that:

Aside from the problems with PackageKit — and, to a lesser extent, the inclusion of KDE 4.0.3 — Fedora 9 manages to balance innovation with a high degree of usability. Over the last few months, Fedora has been increasingly compared favorably with Ubuntu on both accounts, and, to a large extent, it deserves this praise. If anything, it has probably exceeded Ubuntu in innovation, with at least a dozen major new ideas in every release. It is a rare release, too, in which Fedora’s menus and dialog do not show minor tinkering to fine-tune the user experience.

Yet the problems in Fedora 9 emphasize how difficult a balance the Fedora project tries to maintain. The fact that improvements are coming for both KDE and PackageKit, and that, meanwhile, workarounds exist, is beside the point — these facts are lucky accidents, and nothing that Fedora has done.

Although Fedora’s innovations make it one of the more interesting distributions to use and watch these days, the project needs to temper its creativity with more consideration of how changes affect users. Perhaps these relatively minor problems will help the distribution correct its release policies before a major disaster happens in a future release.

Source: Fedora 9: Leading edge or bleeding edge?

Computerworld conclude:

On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux distribution that will probably serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can rightly claim extensive experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it practically invented the market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure an extensive repository of prebuilt software. The hardware support is right up there with any other user-friendly distribution.

Source: Linux examined: Fedora 9

Rahul Sundaram wrote on Redhatmagazine:

KDE 4 shows exciting potential but still has a long way to go. Those who remember the days of KDE or GNOME 2.0 won’t be disappointed at the current state. Today’s new audience might have different expectations, and it is unlikely the majority has the patience to deal with a major rewrite like this one. Even the Linux kernel has moved towards incremental progress over major rewrites in a development branch. The KDE project has taken a big risk, hoping to jump-start innovation. I hope they get it right. Along with the interesting acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia, the future is exciting and uncertain… and that’s just the way I like it.

Source: Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4

Other reviews:

Softpedia: First Look at Sulphur, Fedora 9
Reg Developer: Fedora 9 - an OS that even the Linux challenged can love
DistroWatch: First impressions of Fedora 9 with KDE 4