So Fedora 17 beta was supposed to have been released on April 3. Today is April 5 and we are still waiting. But that is the way it is with the Fedora project. Release dates are not set in concrete. They will release something when it is ready, not to meet a predetermined release schedule.

When it does become available for the public to play with, hopefully before Easter Sunday, you will find a small Easter present on the main edition, that is, the edition that uses the GNOME 3 desktop.

If you have attempted to run a GNOME 3 desktop in a virtual environment, you will most certainly have seen this message:



With Fedora 17, you will no longer see that message, which means that you can now run it in a virtual environment. You can now enjoy all the user-unfriendliness of a GNOME 3 desktop without having to install it on real hardware. But it is not just Fedora 17, because the Live demo of GNOME 3.4 that was released last month also ran in a virtual environment in standard mode. You view some here.

I am sure that you are elated to know that. The following screen shots were taken from a test installation of Fedora 17 beta running in Virtualbox. Note that Fedora 17 has not been publicly released. I just managed to get my paws on it early. You obviously have figured out by the tone of this article that I am not a fan of the default GNOME 3 desktop. But I like Fedora. That is why I will like to see Fedora 17 GNOME tweaked out of the box to make it more user-friendly, just like Linux Deepin.

The login screen.



The default desktop. Where are all the applications?



The desktop showing the user indicator.



The activities view.



Finally, the applications.



Games.



System utilities.

