The best part with most GNU/Linux distros is you can try them even without touching your hard drive. So, you can try Fedora 9 Live CD to have a look at the offering; and then you may go on to install it. Now, what's better? A lot.
You can pick either of the desktop environments, KDE4 or GNOME which now includes a webcam photo and video creation utility called Cheese, improved network filesystem support, a new international clock applet, Google Calendar support and custom e-mail labels in Evolution (alternative to Outlook), a new Remote Desktop Viewer, improved accessibility features and PolicyKit integration.
Firefox 3 is the default browser for Internet browsing, which brings a number of major improvements including a native look and feel, desktop integration, the new Places replacement for bookmarks and a re-worked address bar.
Live USB images now support persistence, so your data and setting changes will be preserved even after rebooting. It also includes the PackageKit, a new set of graphical and console tools, with a framework for cross-distribution software management, which has replaced Pirut in this release of Fedora. The PackageKit graphical updater is available instead of Pup. Behind PackageKit, the performance of yum has been significantly improved.
More Features:
* Ext4, the next version of the mature and stable ext3 filesystem is available as an option in this release. Ext4 features better performance, higher storage capacity and several other new features.
* FreeIPA makes managing auditing, identity and policy processes easier by providing Web-based and command line provisioning, and administration tools to ease system administration. FreeIPA combines the power of the Fedora Directory Server with FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution.
* This release of Fedora uses Upstart, an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon.
* The completely free and open source Java environment OpenJDK 6 is installed by default. IcedTea 7, derived from OpenJDK 1.7, is no longer the default. IcedTea includes a browser plug-in based on GCJ and is available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. GCJ is still the default on PPC architecture.
* OpenOffice.org 2.4, with many new features, is available as part of Fedora 9.
* Fedora now includes Perl 5.10.0, which features a smaller memory footprint and other improvements.
* Fedora now includes TeXLive to replace the older, unmaintained TeX distribution.
* Fedora 9 features a 2.6.25-based kernel.
