Fedora’s latest release is proving really nice.  Alot of work has gone into porting some of the cool XGL widgets into the native desktop using xorg extensions.  For example the famous ‘cube’ desktop switch… as simple as using the sytem preferences menu to enable desktop effects (at least assuming your video drivers are all supported!).

I found a very good reference page with Tips & Tricks that helps identify alot of the things a typical user might want to install in addition to the core fc6 packages.

Also taking my first foray into using the Beryl window manager… so far so good!…  If your interested in seeing it for yourself check out this video on YouTube. I did have a slight problem at first with my menu bars not rendering, but a quick restart of X seemed to remedy that.  The nice thing about Beryl is the beryl-manager lets me switch window managers on the fly.  This is useful as there is still an outstanding bug that prevents swing apps from rendering correctly while using xgl/compiz..  So now, being an IntelliJ IDE user, which is swing based, I can effectively start up IntelliJ using the default gnome window manager, then switch to Beryl and still have it function. Still painful.. but worth it for all the candy that you get.

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