After a lot of delays and postponements finally hopefully by the afternoon we will have among us: the new stable release of Fedora , Fedora 18 , codenamed “Spherical Cow”, is finally (almost) ready for the general public who waited less than 2 months longer than expected because of some critical bugs that the development team was not able to solve on schedule.

Fedora 18 brings with it a complete update of the distribution’s package that will surely give you a performance boost and will ensure a better user experience to the end user. The main novelty of Fedora 18 is its new graphical installer, in fact Anaconda completamene has been rewritten to provide the user with an installation process simpler and more immediate.

The desktop environment reference will be GNOME 3.6 in vanilla version, as only Fedora can offer, but of course there are also versions with KDE , LXDE and XFCE . Moreover, in its repository you can find other graphical environments such as Mate and Cinnamon .

Another great feature of this Fedora 18 is full support for UEFI and Secure Boot , in fact if we have a next generation PC we install and use Fedora 18 without any problems or manually editing the bootloader.

A few other highlights of this release:

Linux kernel 3.6.11 – This means it has a lot of new device drivers and hardware support. For example, this is one of the very few current Linux distributions which supports the Ralink 3290 WiFi adapter in my HP Pavilion dm1-4310 out of the box.

X.org X Server 1.13.1 – Supports my various Intel and AMD/ATI Radeon graphic adapters with the FOSS radeon driver. I don’t currently have anything with a nVidia adapter, so I can’t comment on support for that.

Gnome 3.6.2

Firefox 18.0 – Keeping up with Firefox releases is not exactly easy any more. In fact, you have to install the latest updates after completing the base installation to get up to 18.0.

LibreOffice 3.6.3.2 – Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress all included

Shotwell 0.13.1 – Photo management

Rhythmbox 2.98 – Audio player

Totem 3.6.3 – Gnome movie player

If you are interested to know all the news you can see this page of the wiki of Fedora .

You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on best how to’s on web, about computing, gadgets, Facebook, iPhone, Android, Microsoft, Linux, Mac, OpenSource and many more.