I had a discussion today on the Board of Directors mailing list about why I like Fedora and why I would like to see Fedora correspondent do a short piece for the show. I thought I would add the text here, so everyone in the community could read it more easily. It may be of interest to those who are not fully happy with Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows:

I am using Fedora more and more for the following reasons:

1. Packages are more up-to-date, which I find useful. For example, I have a ATI HD3450 card on my main system and there is a known (and old) bug in the proprietary drivers. However, Fedora has in it default repos the open source experimental mesa (currently only in
Lucid on Ubuntu), which allow me to get fantastic compiz performance.
In Karmic, I need to install an updated kernel and a PPA to get the
same effect.

2. The Fedora gnome desktop is far nicer looking. I have a massive aesthetic complaint with the notification icon area in Ubuntu, as the notifications icons are too often different sizes and spacing. Fedora
have replaced this applet with one of their own, making the
notification area far more clean, and quite frankly catching up with
KDE, Windows (even XP!) and Mac which all have nicer notification
areas than the gnome default applet. Ubuntu are trying to achieve
this goal their own way with Lucid, however, currently, their new
notification icons break support for Gnome 3 Shell.

3. Fedora has far far more stable support for multiple desktops. You can have Gnome, KDE, LXDE and XFCE desktop all co-existing on same
installation far more easily than in Ubuntu. Ubuntu often struggles
with this, and has known bugs such as if you install KDM, your stuck
with KDE cursors on Gnome desktop.

4. Fedora has better support for Gnome 3 Shell. I think Gnome shell is fantastic, especially on a netbook. Fedora 12 has out of the box
support for Gnome Shell (and as I mentioned better compatibility).
For example, it is possible in Fedora to switch between Gnome 2
(without compiz), Gnome 2 (with compiz) and gnome shell from a simple
dialog box. Getting Gnome-Shell running in Ubuntu requires installing
from synaptic, and then either running it from a terminal command or
adding it to start-up. There is no easy way to switch between them
seamlessly within a session.

5. The Fedora desktop have a far better looking boot screen, login
window and uses Plymouth which makes boot alot more flicker free
(Plymouth is only present in Lucid Alpha).

6. Fedora has a great UI for what are essentially meta-packages,
which allow you to install groups of applications for repos all at
once.

7. At last time of asking, Linus Torvalds was a Fedora user, so using Fedora I believe gives me +1 imaginary geek points lol.

i dont know, i dont make my choice on the versions of software, as long as it supports what i use it for, and most of the time, that was already done within gnome 1.x applications 10 years ago.

about the designs, one does his own thing on the theming after a while anyways, so i really dont take a huge emphasis in some default theming of distributions.

I use Ubuntu because I can't say the name