You are right on all the points you quote (and I apologize for my statement about preupgrade) but what I really pointed out to was the lack of preparation and information on the upgrade process to FC 12.

I’m pretty sure FC 12, if cleanly installed, works well. What does not seem to have worked for me was the upgrade process that basically turned everything rough (and graphical drivers for nvidia used to work well for me even with nouveau on my fc 11) into something that I felt was not worth fixing. My criticism is there, in a nutshell.

This is not correct. The bug to which I presume you’re referring (calculation of free space in /boot) was discovered over a week before release, and an updated preupgrade was sent to updates-testing for F10 and F11 in advance of the official release. The issue was fully documented on the Common Bugs page, which is referred to in all documentation, before the release, including links to the updated preupgrade packages.

“I discovered afterwards that there was no available drivers for nvidia cards on Fedora 12, either free or proprietary (or rather that the packages were not ready yet).”

This is also not correct. Fedora 12 includes the best free driver, nouveau. Of course we would not ship a release with no drivers for NVIDIA cards, that would be absurd.

“But the live system would not recognize my wireless network nor would it even link to any driver for 3D.”

Fedora does not supply, support or encourage the use of proprietary drivers, by policy. The Fedora project believes in the importance of free / open source software. So, no, we will not direct you to proprietary drivers for your graphics card. This is not a bug, it’s feature.

It sounds like you tried to preupgrade from a system with third-party packages installed. It’s difficult to guarantee that this will produce a good result. We should probably flag this up better on the preupgrade instructions.

I can’t tell you what’s going on with your wireless card without actually knowing what it is, but likely it requires a driver that’s either proprietary or not of sufficient quality to be included in Fedora’s kernel. The Fedora kernel team does not accept drivers which are of a low enough standard that they have no hope of being integrated into the main kernel in time; this is to encourage the development of proper quality drivers. Again, this is a policy decision made for important reasons; you may not agree with it, but it’s not just that we suck.

Some of these low-quality drivers are made available by the third-party RPM Fusion repository, however.