The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 15, the 'first' stable distro to come with Gnome 3 as the default desktop environment.

Fedora, is a bleeding edge GNU/Linux-based distribution which comes with the latest software packages for enthusiasts and dare-devils to try. However, Fedora can also be used by average users who are interesting in learning more about GNU/Linux systems.

The best features of Fedora 15, which will attract a lot of users is Gnome 3 shell. Fedora 15 will give users a distro which will allow then to explore Gnome 3 with the stability that Fedora 15 offers.

Fedora 15 is also introducing Btrfs as a menu item in the installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4) and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem in the next release of Fedora.

The btrfsck program for performing filesystem checks is under active development upstream with participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!).

Fedora 15 comes with Indic typing booster, a predictive input method for the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input, and users can simply select a word from the suggestion list and improve their typing speed and accuracy. Thanks to the development led by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team engineers in Pune, India.

Live images in this release use XZ compression instead of gzip as in older releases, making them smaller (about 10%) to download or providing more space for  applications to be made available by default.

Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption
and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes, improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency.

Muktware has release a comprehensive Fedora 15 Manual, read it here.