My latest experience with Fedora was quite underwhelming, to say the least. I certainly do know that there are bits and pieces in there, that really make a difference, too bad that the casual user will never see them because - well - he’ll never install Fedora.
Why is that?

Anaconda

Anaconda by and in itself is a pain. At least on Fedora.

Deterministic behavior and rescue console

Usually I’d expect a tool to behave the same everytime I use, especially when the circumstances haven’t changed. Not so with Anaconda. Back in the Fedora 7 or 8 days when I tried to install Fedora to my laptop, anaconda wasn’t able to find my USB DVD drive. OK, I gotta give the Fedora guys some slack since USB drives were quite a novelty back in 2007. Not!
The problem went away when I copied over the contents of the installer DVD to my hard disk - USB, nothing less - and fired up the Fedora install process. This time Anaconda was able to find my optical drive. Needless to say that it didn’t find my USB hard disk.

Something similar happened this weekend when I was trying to install F9. For some reason inexplicable to me anaconda hang three times while trying to download stage2.img. I wasn’t even able to check for network problems since - naturally - nobody thought of adding a rescue console to anaconda.

Mirrorlist

How do you go about when you encounter a virgin computer you want to install Fedora on and you only have a netinstall image? For every other distro I know you will eventually have the possibility to choose a mirror server from a list to install from. Not in Fedora, though. You are forced to manually enter the full URL of the repository you want to install from.
http://fedora.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os in my case. Now isn’t that userfriendly? What do you do when this mirror is down for maintenance at the very moment when you tried to install Fedora and you haven’t written down or memorized another one? Bummer.

Talking about the mirrorlist: While I fully understand the need to undergo infrastructural diagnosis and changes, it is pretty poor to not have the mirrorlist available for an entire weekend.
[Update] Word on the street has it that the Fedora infrastructure got compromised [/Update]

A sane and working packet selection

The anaconda package selection dialog isn’t the most comfortable to use. OK. That’s something I could overlook if it was actually working. But it isn’t! It wasn’t in F8, it still isn’t in F9 and it probably won’t be in F10! You’re trying to install a minimal system? No office programs, no gnome, no graphical internet, no Java, no additional fonts? Yeah, you could de-select the associated checkboxes, but guess what? It won’t help you. Anaconda will install the packages contained in those categories anyway. Unless you de-select every. single. package. Now isn’t that userfriendly? That’s the reason why Fedora with de-selected Java, Graphical Internet, Fonts, Gnome still doesn’t fit onto a 2GB Compact Flash drive. Anyway, I got it stripped down to 1.6 GB right now. But that’s probably it. Why? Let me tell you.

Up-to-date packages for netinstall repositories

Yes, it’s indeed very convenient to download stuff twice. Isn’t that supposed to be the beauty of net installs? To have a current version right away? Without having to update the system afterwards *again*?

I know that the days of yonder when everyone had just analog modems or ISDN as their primary internet connection are long gone. Nevertheless, downloading two Gigabytes of packages *twice* and having to install them *twice* sure still takes quite some time.

Sane dependencies

Yes, fellas! It is possible! You don’t need totally braindead dependencies!
There is no sensible reason for about half of the necessary packages to be indirectly dependent on fedora-release-notes-9.0.0-1.noarch.rpm, which eats away 14Megs of valuable disk space and which noone is going to take a look at.
Another good example is cdparanoia-libs, which seems to be linked into about every other packet.

Mature Software

OK, granted, you wanted to have KDE4 in your distro. Everybody does. But c’mon! At least give users the choice to go back to KDE3 when needed. I’m sure there are other occurences like this one.

USB Install Images

Yes, I’m fully aware of the fact that creating USB images is easily done yourself. If you happen to be in that lucky situation to either have Windows or Fedora (probably RHEL and CentOS too) installed. But still: You will have to go through a tedious procedure to get there. I want to be able to download a rudimentary Netinstall image which I can dd to my USB stick.
No big deal, is it? Live USB images would be nice too, possibly set up for sizes of 2GB and 4GB or something. You would do the community a huge favor.

That’s just some of the obvious issues I found when trying to install Fedora. That means I didn’t even go looking for problems.

Seriously, guys. You can do better than that.