Goodbye Fedora 18, See You in 2013

The Fedora distribution has always had a troubled development cycle, with a never-ending stream of delays and problems. It seem that Fedora 18 is plagued by the same issues and the final version will be delayed until 2013.

When it comes to naming the distributions, the Fedora community has been keen to find the craziest names possible, but the development is not working as fast as it should.

Every version gets postponed, sometimes by several weeks. The latest Fedora 18 Beta version has been pushed back yet another two weeks, according to the Go/No-Go meeting on Thursday.

“At FESCo meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 18 Beta release by *two* weeks to give the Installer team, the new upgrade tool and Secure Boot time to finish and polish these features to meet our release quality standards,” said Jaroslav Reznik from Red Hat.

“As a result, Fedora 18 Beta will be pushed out by two weeks, the development is re-opened, with tentative Change Deadline on Nov 13.

“Fedora 18 Beta release is now Nov 27. Anyone with objections to enter Beta freeze on Nov 13 can file a ticket with FESCo on the Nov 12/13 and it will be discussed in the ticket or on special meeting,” he continued.

This means that Final Change deadline has been rescheduled for December 18, pushing the final release to January 8, 2013.

Jaroslav Reznik also hinted, in the same announcement, that Fedora 18 might even skip that deadline.

“Please, work on your blocker bugs and help testing the Fedora 18, so we will be able to release in the beginning of January.”

Dubbed Spherical Cow, Fedora 18 is powered by a development release of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.6 and brings numerous features, improvements and bug fixes over previous releases.

In the meantime, you can download Fedora 18 Alpha right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.