Hot on the heels of Ubuntu 8.10, Red Hat has a new version of Fedora preparing to go out the door later this month. After the remarkable level of polish on Intrepid, Red Hat's Cambridge has a tough act to follow, even if the two distros aren't meant to cover the same territory -- or even compete with each other.

The ways Ubuntu and Fedora diverge are pretty clear by now. The former is the most explicitly user-friendly, desktop-oriented distribution out there; the latter is more like a simple seed from which many other things can be grown. In a way, that's one of the things I've actually liked about Fedora. It didn't contain anything I didn't really feel like I needed, and I could always add to it after the fact. It's not as out-and-out raw as something like Gentoo, where absolutely everything has to be done from scratch, but it's also not typically been as polished end-to-end as Ubuntu is.

Still, I have to ask: is it legitimate to think of sizing up Ubuntu vs. Fedora as a competition? It's not as if one steals market share from the other in the biggest picture; when any one Linux distribution wins attention and accolades, all of them win by proxy. All the more reason to think of the Linux world as a continuum, where each distribution isn't so much an island unto itself as a different burg: Ubuntu's San Francisco to Fedora's Chicago, for instance, instead of one being Paris and the other Tokyo. They ultimately have more in common than they are separate.

What's new in 10 is described in detail in the release notes, but a couple of things caught my eye: a new version of RPM (about time!), a faster and leaner startup, GStreamer codec installation assistance (something also in Ubuntu), and a system-repair tool called FirstAidKit, which is "designed to automatically fix problems while focusing on maintaining user data integrity." The last is something I hope I never have to use, but it's comforting to know it's been made into a working feature.

I'll be giving 10 a whirl during the course of the week. If you've already gotten your hands dirty with it, sound off below.

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