I upgraded my laptop to the development version of Feisty Fawn today. Overall, it’s a pretty incremental upgrade but it has a few nice features.

Things I liked:

• The kernel is upgraded to 2.6.20, and the Broadcom bcm43xx driver finally just works, and I get a signal strength indicator as well. Even works with WPA!
• gnome-power-manager has a new “Power Statistics” dialog that graphs battery usage, which I think is pretty cool
• The upgrade went flawlessly, which was awesome

Things that need more work:

• Evolution seems to be getting less stable over time, and isn’t really improving at all. No one wants to work on it because it has a byzantine architecture and is maintained by Novell who let patches sit in Bugzilla until they rot; their feature list consists of “fix showstopping bugs that we let into the release anyways”. No one wants to step up and replace Evo though because it’s a huge amount of code to duplicate and it handles weird server RFC deviations pretty well. Schade.
• Hibernate still isn’t fixed, I have to manually write in “resume=/dev/hda2″ every time I kernel upgrade. Sleep is also broken, which it wasn’t in Edgy
• Many of the preferences have been moved into the revamped “GNOME Control Center” application, which I don’t really like because it’s just another click and the app is more difficult to navigate than the menu was. The only items exposed in the prefs menu now are ones I don’t want to change.
• 3D Acceleration is hosed again, I don’t know why.

That sounded more negative than positive, but really I think that Feisty will be a pretty decent upgrade, especially if they get the multimedia stuff they’ve been working on done, so that people don’t have to wreck their system trying to install codecs.