Time-based release cycles have been extremely beneficial for free and open source software projects and the idea has caught on organically. Taking it to the next level, "meta-cycles" for projects and Linux distributions that consume all of the upstream projects, hasn't gone so quickly.

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware.

This month, however, I had a chance to install and test Fedora 7, the latest community-based release from the folks at Red Hat. Fedora and Novell's OpenSuse are Ubuntu Linux's two chief "competitors," if you care to frame things that way.

Spring is in the air! The trees are budding and the flowers are starting to come out of their slumber. It also means that it is time for another release of the desktop oriented Ubuntu Linux.

Some projects make it easy for Linux distros to package their software, others not so much. Google Chrome, or rather its Chromium project, is one of those projects that is emphatically not easy for Linux distros to re-package and ship. Tom Callaway of the Fedora project explained this week why he's packaging Chromium for Fedora users, but not as an official Fedora package.

Six-month cycles are great. Now let's talk about meta-cycles: broader release cycles for major work. I'm very interested in a cross-community conversation about this, so will sketch out some ideas and then encourage people from as many different free software communities as possible to comment here.

Fedora 11 has been released, it has faster performance and new security, virtualization, desktop and server features

How does Fedora 10 stack up against Ubuntu 8.10? Last week Fedora Linux released its latest version, Fedora 10. We take a look at how it stacks up against Ubuntu 8.10, released a month before.

We in the open source community live in a bubble world. People live in an Ubuntu bubble or a Fedora bubble. Fedora 9 was just released and I, as an Ubuntu user, couldn’t care less. I don’t use Fedora, so the announcement of Fedora 9, does not resonate with me. Likewise, when Hardy Heron was released in April, Fedora users let out a collective yawn.