I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world.

But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

So what new features can we expect to see in Fedora 11?

Xfce is one of the hidden gems of the free desktop. It has managed -- quite successfully -- to capture the familiar feel of a desktop environment while maintaining the speed and responsiveness of the pure window manager. Its small footprint and minimalist approach makes it great for older, less powerful hardware -- but it is full-bodied and functional enough that many choose to use it on machines that can easily handle other desktop environments. The desktop aims to be functional, attractive, light on system resources, and adhere to the specifications proposed by Freedesktop participants to maximize interoperability.

Today, after two years of development, Xfce has officially released the 4.6.0 version of the desktop environment. Some notable new features include "out of the box" hibernate and suspend functions, a newly re-written sound mixer that leverages gstreamer to support multiple sound cards and configurations, and improvements and enhancements to the Thunar file manager.

One of the most appealing aspects of open source software is its ability to be almost everything to everyone. Fine, it's hyperbole, but flexibility and access to the source code means a wide array of needs can be met for diverse groups of people -- and the shared efforts benefit developers as much as those who've never written (or seen) a line of code. I've been enamored of the Moblin Project for some time, simply because it so clearly demonstrates that open source can be as hands-on (or off) as you'd like.

On Monday, the Moblin team announced its Moblin V2 Core alpha release was available for testing. Tariq Shureih, Moblin Linux Engineering Manager, says that this alpha release is the first chance the wider community has to really kick the tires on a number of new features, including package and core interactions, the "Fastboot" feature, new user interface development and connectivity tools, and a new iteration of the Moblin Image Creator.