Reflections on switching from Microsoft's Metro UI experiment to GNOME 3 and automatic multiseat.

I'm posting this months after it actually happened, mostly because life got in the way and kept me busy.

Microsoft's Windows 8 got a lot of things right under the hood. It felt fast, fluid, and remarkably responsive compared to Windows 7. I know people are absolutely hating it, but I actually liked it. But after spending extended time with Fedora 17 (code-named Beefy Miracle), Microsoft's vision of the desktop feels like a step backward into a walled garden.

Fedora 17 delivered a massive batch of improvements under the hood. The most impressive part was getting GNOME Shell running smoothly even on systems lacking 3D hardware acceleration via software rendering fallback. They also started the long-overdue transition to a unified file system by merging legacy /usr/bin and /usr/sbin binaries into a single clean hierarchy to make Linux file structures sane again.

A few standout technical highlights from running F17:

1. Kernel & Tools: Shipped with Linux kernel 3.3.4, updated OpenStack ("Essex") for cloud workloads, and introduced native support for JBoss Application Server 7.
2. GNOME 3.4 & Desktop Sane Defaults: GNOME 3.4 brought smooth scrolling, refactored application search, and the sleek "Web" browser (Epiphany). KDE 4.8 and GIMP 2.8 (finally introducing single-window mode!) rounded out desktop software options.
3. Automatic Multiseat Support: This is probably the coolest feature in F17. On standard Linux distributions, multiple users could log into TTY consoles simultaneously. Automatic multiseat brought this concept to full graphical sessions. Plug in a second monitor, USB keyboard, and mouse into a single PC tower, and two people can run independent, full-fledged graphical desktops at the exact same time. On modern multi-core PCs, this saves money, desk space, and power in budget homelabs or small offices.

Windows 8 tried to bridge smartphones and desktop PCs by shoving full-screen tiled Metro menus in everyone's face whether they wanted them or not. Fedora 17 took the opposite approach: refining power-user tools, fixing long-standing Linux architectural clutter, and keeping the OS modular.

If you haven't given Fedora a spin on bare metal recently, grab the ISO and try it. It's easily one of the most solid Linux releases to date.

Image Credit: Fedora logo and wordmark.svg by Unknown authorUnknown author, licensed under Public domain.