Fedora 15, not as bad as people claim...

Reading the fedora planet I got the impression that the new Fedora 15 alpha release must suck.

This impression is mostly based on the screenshots Nicu posted as well as the accompanying, vicious review.

Having seen these, I naturally had to try the new F15 release for myself to see what this is all about.

Having booted it up in a virtual machine I am now ready to proclaim that Fedora 15 does not suck. The system greets me the same way prior releases did and the only noticable difference is a different release name and newer kernel release.

However, in the few minutes I spent with the new release I have to say that I already found two bugs:
After switching to the graphical login screen with gdm3, the screen becomes garbled. Suddenly the background is full of scanlines reminding me of the old days when I didn't had the correct modeline in the /etc/X11/X11.conf file.
I was assured however on IRC, that my hardware is not broken and this is the normal design for the Alpha release and the final one will not destroy my display. Thank god for that.

The other bug is that after ignoring the garbled screen and actually logging in, the desktop has become totally broken and hideous. Black and grey bars are alternating and hurting my eyes, functionality is missing, I have to switch constantly to the command line to change settings etc...

Again however the friendly people on the IRC channel came to the rescue and informed me that this is a known bug (tracked in the ohh so aptly named F15GnomeFAIL tracker) and it is actually not a software bug but human error.
It seems I just picked the wrong iso image thinking that the Desktop-ISO is actually for the Desktop. It looks like this is a common mistake and the real Desktop Spin is further down on the Download page. Silly me, we obviously have to better educate our Target Audience to pick the right image.

While I am actually very interested in seeing what the Gnome3 shell actually has to offer, this is not the release to do so. I seriously ask myself if this is the most unfinished and broken-by-default Fedora release there ever was. The Go/No-Go meeting should have just taken the hard decision and delayed the F15 release by 6 months. Maybe then this would look more like a release and less than a trainwreck.
I am basically disgusted at this point.