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I tried Fedora Core 4 (or was it 5) a while back. I remember downloading and burning 4 CD's and battling to get it installed on my old Dell Dimension PC. I found it a little bit buggy, difficult to configure (I don't like spending a lot of time configuring an OS) and had loads of problems with regards to networking amongst many other things, it just didn't feel right. So I sacked it, binned the CD's and went back to using SUSE 9.0. Since then I have made the switch, like so many others probably have to everyone's favorite, Ubuntu and have been using the most current release since (as of writing this that is Lucid Lynx). Everything was going well until with Ubuntu until I upgraded to 10.04. A few of their latest packages seem a little unstable (I am running Evolution with dbg right now waiting for it to crash). But I am not writing this to talk about issues I am having with Ubuntu. I had been following news on Fedora for a while, since I had not fallen out of love with it completely. When I saw the announcement for the release of Fedora 13, I immediately downloaded it and created a Live USB using unetbootin. I decided to install it on my laptop as I could safely destroy all the data on it since all my work lies in subversion repositories and my dropbox account. I was well impressed with the installation experience. There was, all the usual options that you would expect from an installer and it was rapid! After about 5 minutes of booting the Live USB, setting up the installer to start running, I left the room and made some coffee. When I returned it was complete. This suggests it took less than the 7(ish) minutes I was away from the laptop. On first booting Fedora 13 you are asked to set up your user account and log in. The packages that come with the Live version are not too overwhelming, which is good, in most cases all you need is a simple set of tools to get the job done. ie gedit, empathy, rhythmbox, pino, etc. The configuration is simple, and well designed. There is not a huge array of 'configurators' that you get with a distro like Ubuntu, there is a simplified well defined set of easy to use controls to configure your desktop and system -  there is even a colour manager, to set up colour output for your display (very cool). The graphical package install is a little difficult to use, however. All in all, the whole feel of Fedora 13 is really robust and stable, sometimes other distro's desktops just feel like your mouse cursor might fall through the desktop , I am yet to experience this feeling yet with Fedora 13. I am still getting to know Fedora but what I have seen so far it has been a great experience. I'm going to leave it on the laptop and continue using it to see how it goes. Go get it and give it a whirl.