Fedora 12: No steps forward, 8 steps back, off a cliff

I could swear I wrote a similar post about Fedora 11. Basically, a new release, and everything gets worse, again.

This time around:

• X crashes a lot. Starting certain programmes crash my X server, making my desktop disappear and return to the login manager. Certain programmes like "About this Computer" and "System Monitor". Or, resuming from suspend. Yah, it's probably my video card, which is an intel and was once heralded as a good choice for Linux.
• Suspend: I can suspend, and I can resume, and I can watch X crash after resuming. See above.
• 3D effects and acceleration: the computer hangs now. It gives me two seconds of indecision and then just freezes up. Nothing to do but power down the machine.
• The "good" video source is broken, somehow. I have to go to my multimedia subsystem's properties dialog (not installed by default) and change it over to something simpler to get any video from applications like Totem movie player, or to see my face played back from my webcam.
• Cheese photo booth. Actually, this broken sometime in the last couple of months. It no longer shows a feed of what the webcam sees. Instead, when I start it, it shows one static frame from the webcam feed and doesn't update again. I can still take photos and video, but that's about it. Oh, stopping video freezes the programme, so I have to kill it and restart it.
• Authenticate! So, certain administrative dialogues and menus requires the use "authenticate" themselves. I think you're supposed to put in the administrative (root) password, but I don't know, because clicking any of the buttons on the dialogue does nothing! Nothing! It just sits there. Closing it via the window manager still gets rid of it, thankfully.
• Tablet not recognised as such. What's wrong with this? It used to work. It works now. It will soon not work. This is progress? I thought they might have instead fixed the bug where, after resuming from suspend, the cursor jumps when using the stylus. They did! By breaking tablet support for a relatively common tablet: an IBM Thinkpad X41t. Liv's tablet thankfully is recognised as such but encounters a ridiculous error in the driver during booting that prevents it from functioning. It doesn't even think to check that mine is a Tablet. Sigh.

This is why I cannot recommend Linux or Fedora in particular to any of my friends, ever. I need at least two releases where they haven't seriously broken existing functionality at launch. They've less than a month until the final release if anyone takes an interest in the myriad of bugs I filed yesterday for these. But, gauging from history, I might get a comment, and then they'll move on to bugs that matter to them more. Sigh.

Conclusion: Fedora 12 sucks. But I think I wrote an almost identical post about Fedora 11. Of course, after a week of tinkering, I was able to get things working on my system. I'm sure all users are sufficiently technically minded and forgiving to invest a week for Fedora 12, too!