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.
