Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala

The Good:

• This is the first release in which Pulseaudio has been usable enough to remain installed. Configuration is relatively easy and reliable, with only very occasional problems.
• Default desktop effects are reliable, and don't cause loss of functionality which previously included such things as: Loss of expected Metacity behaviour and lagginess when watching videos.
  

The Bad:

• Not exactly the fastest installer in the world.
• Installing the boot loader to the root partition has been, and still doesn't work as expected.
• Replacing Pidgin with the feature-lacking Empathy as the default instant messenger was not a good move. Empathy lacks support for file-transfers and voice and video for common protocols, nor does it work behind proxies, which are common for institutional users.
  

Overall, not as good as Jaunty. 7/10.

Fedora 12

The Good:

• Plymouth is demonstrated brilliantly, seamless video mode transitions from kernel load until shut down.
  
• Installer is very fast, by means of image copying. Configuration is delayed where possible to the first boot in the new installation, where the environment is far more responsive.
• Automatically detected heterogeneous dual monitor configuration.
• RPM Fusion is easy to set up.
• KDE4 configuration is the best I've seen in a binary distro to date, and the GNOME setup is very clean and snappy.
  

The Bad:

• New partitions can only be positioned at the beginning of free regions.
• BIOS RAID metadata is not ignored, and can crash the installer.
• The updater is slow, and doesn't provide much information on what's going on.
• There's no way to configure package sources in a GUI.
• No proprietary packages, and no immediate documentation is provided on how to obtain these (MP3 codecs, nVidia drivers), but RPM Fusion can alleviate this a little.
• It can be difficult to identify exactly which package to install, with the enormous description text being more visible than the package name itself.
• Default IM is Empathy (which isn't a feature parity replacement for Pidgin yet).
• I experienced some bugs in Rhythmbox which could be related to choices or misconfiguration in GTK+ or some other component.

Summary:

Not yet as usable as Ubuntu, even considering the policy surrounding proprietary software and RPM Fusion. However this is the best Fedora release since Fedora 7.

Score:

5/10.