Fedora 18 was released in the middle of last month without too much fanfare. I suspect this is likely because the beta was extremely buggy; many people had trouble installing Fedora 18 Beta using the new Anaconda installer interface, and I myself even filed a bug report for GRUB2 not loading after installation (which is still outstanding).
Why should you be interested in Fedora 18? Well, aside from the fact that it’s already a very popular desktop distro, according to this article from ServerWatch.com, Fedora 17 and Fedora 18 will debut some of the features slated for release in RHEL 7, which is due out within the next year or so.
The most notable package update for the desktop is Gnome 3.6.2. It changes quite a few things from the previous releases of gnome, including the removal of gnome-fallback mode. This creates a really sluggish interface on older hardware, and I highly recommend using a different desktop if you fall into this category of users. I think Gnome 3 offers an absolutely beautiful desktop experience, and I use it on my primary workstation. However, in VMs I prefer to run LXDE, which is available from the Fedora Install DVD or NetInstall ISO (in addition to the ‘spin’).
Frankly, I don’t care too much about the desktop software, I’m interested in the enterprise software offerings.
Fedora 18 is shipping with Samba 4.0, which allows establishing trust between a Fedora FreeIPA server and an Active Directory Domain Controller.
With Fedora 18 it is possible to create a trust relationship between an IPA and an Active Directory domain which would allow users from one domain to access resources of the other domain.
Source: Fedora 18 Release Notes
Also, a big upgrade to the KVM stack is the ability to take live snapshots of running virtual machines.
Speaking of virtualization, there are a number of ‘cloud’ offerings being included in Fedora 18, most notably Eucalyptus.
In my opinion, the days of RHEL being a command-line only distro are fading quickly. For instance, iptables is no longer our default firewall. The service firewalld and it’s command line equivalent firewall-cmd are enough to send even the most dedicated system admins running for the hills.