In her email announcing the release of Fedora 16, codenamed "Verne", Bergeron adds a touching tribute to Dennis Ritchie, "A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you, Dennis."

Fedora 16 focuses on the cloud. Bergeron tells NetworkWorld, "I might be biased as being part of the Cloud SIG, but I think that the presence of multiple IaaS platforms (Aeolus and OpenStack), along with cloud-ready storage (HekaFS, which is an extension of GlusterFS), and a tech preview of application-service high-availability for the cloud (in Pacemaker-cloud) gives us a nice, broad range of cloud technologies. And I'm hoping — but not promising — to see that extended into Fedora 17 with the addition of Eucalyptus and Cloudstack, along with perhaps getting into big data fun."

What else is new in the latest Fedora? Gnome 3.2 features, including new contact management application integrated with Empathy, Evolution, and the new Online Accounts settings panel, a new document management application for local and in-cloud documents, and KDE 4.7 are a few of the highlights. DigiKam 2.0 adds face recognition and geotagging, and a new shutdown dialog lets users with multiple operating systems choose which OS to boot next.

Bergeron's list email says, "For developers: Twenty thousand lines in C...".

The latest Perl, Perl 5.14, which includes Unicode 6.0 support, is included. She adds:

Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.

Sys admins will find GRUB2, a new system account ID numbering (with user IDs starting at 1000), and improved virtualization tools.

Don't worry — Fedora takes care of business, but it still likes to party. Or at least, play games. Fedora 16 includes new games such as Naev, a 2D space trading and combat game; Golly, an open source, cross-platform application for exploring Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata; and Sudoku Savant, a GUI-driven sudoku puzzle game. Check out the release notes to see what else is inside the latest Fedora.