The Fedora Project Team announced yesterday, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1.

The reason I was personally looking at Fedora 11 is that I wanted to see what the very latest MAPI setup in Linux looked like. Fedora is not only the most recent release of the major distros: Fedora also prides itself on being the most bleeding edge of the Distros.

"Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 12! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family.

I’ve been a Fedora fan for years now and have used it at home long before I joined Red Hat. I look forward to May and October to see what’s the new bleeding edge, and I continue to be impressed by the innovation the Fedora community delivers.

Another distribution to release recently is OpenSuSE 11.2. OpenSuSE serves as the base for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In some ways, it's to SuSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. But unlike Fedora, OpenSuSE doesn't live on the bleeding edge.

Fedora makes a great choice for both beginners and advanced users as it balances stability and cutting edge applications. The Fedora distribution effectively fills the needs of home users, programmers and servers alike. Unlike many Linux distros, Fedora always includes the latest versions of software this adds to the excitement of its releases which happen every 6-8 months.

I noticed that most of the awesome X Devs like Peter Hutterer and Kristian Hoegsberg (and let’s not forget Linus Himself!) are using Fedora, and I’ve heard it’s geared towards developers (being bleeding edge and all).

Red Hat's Fedora 13 open-source software can serve in a full gamut of Linux roles, as long as users are prepared to upgrade their systems about once a year.

While most operating systems can't afford to be too bleeding edge, Fedora boldly goes where no one has gone yet. That's a tough task to manage. We learned how they do it. How does one manage the balance between professional users and open source fanatics? Carefully.