I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to FC6. I was pretty happy with my FC5 setup that I'd hacked up to include XGL and compiz, but since AIGLX is supported by default in FC6 and there are repositories with Beryl for FC6 but not FC5, I figured there might be some benefit to an upgrade (plus I wanted to reorganize my partitioning scheme, so it seemed like a good time).

Anyway, here's a short list of the good and the bad:

The good: 1) AIGLX support built in. Well, sort of. If you have an nVidia or Intel video card, you may well be set. If you have ATI you have to use XGL, not AIGLX and you probably have a lot of work to do (and chances are it's fruitless work, but you knew that when you bought ATI anyway). 2) Okay. There is no 2.

The bad: 1) XFS retains its place as a second-class citizen on Fedora. Worse, something has broken since FC5 and if you use "linux xfs" to install the end result will be a corrupt FS when you are done. If you want to use XFS you need to partition and format prior to doing the install (I usually just ctrl+alt+F2 after booting the install CD and do it there). I can't help but note the irony that XFS is the sole reason I started using RedHat (back around 7.0) because SGI offered a modified version of RH7 with XFS support. Yet despite this and the fact that it's the second-oldest journaled FS for Linux, the first to offer features such as ACL support and just basically rocks, RedHat/Fedora continues to pretend it's still beta and not worthy of first-class support. Pretty sad. Frankly if I had to choose between Fedora and XFS it'd be goodbye Fedora. 2) It's a bit flaky. Some of this flakiness I can directly attribute to the beta-quality of several components that I'm responsible for installing (beta nVidia driver for AIGLX support, Beryl), but some other things have simply gone downhill a bit since FC5. NetworkManager is flakier. Sometimes it simply refuses to connect to an access point I was just using a moment before, instead choosing to connect to the neighbor's. Other times it simply crashes. 3) Speaking of NetworkManager, why the hell isn't this daemon turned on by default? It's the best thing happening for dynamic networking on Linux, giving an experience similar to what Mac and Windows users are used to. RedHat wrote it, Fedora ships it, but it's off by default. I played with several half-ass solutions before a damn Ubuntu user told me about it. WTF. Note to RedHat/Fedora: when you write really great software, let people know so that your fine work doesn't go to waste. 4) For some reason, the installer chose an i586 kernel. This became an issue when I found I couldn't load the nVidia drivers (my kernel-devel RPM was for i686). Worse, because the kernel version was right, it took me a while to notice what the issue was. Reinstalling the correct architecture fixed it quite easily but it left me scratching my head for a while. 5) Still shipping Firefox 1.5. I've been using 2.0 release candidates for several weeks and FF2.0 is improved in numerous subtle but readily apparent ways. The overall feel is noticeably smoother. Sure, including 2.0 would have meant delaying FC6 for another couple weeks, but frankly I think that would have been a good idea anyway. FC6 feels like it was rushed for some reason which makes little sense given that the most noticeable improvements (from a desktop perspective) are all centered around AIGLX and compiz. Waiting for FF2.0 would have brought a pretty significant feature to FC6.

Anyway, my overall impression is that FC5 with XGL was actually a bit smoother and quite a bit more stable than my current FC6 install. AIGLX may be the future but XGL works a lot better today (it even felt a bit faster than AIGLX which I found surprising). If you've got a nice FC5 install I'd suggest you stick with it for at least another couple months. FC6 should be considered beta software for the near future.