I've stepped away from living on the edge. I no longer download the lastest nightly of Firefox nor grab each and every test version of OpenOffice. My time has become a much valued comodity  and generally speaking I just don't need the latest and greatest anymore.  My business and even my home network requires stabilty. Therefore each release of Fedora is thoroughly  evaluated  before I decide if  its worth taking the time to install on my various systems. FC4 got me because I needed to have PHP 5.0, MySQL 4.1. and OpenOffice 2.0. Actually, so far the only version of FC I decided to pass on was FC2, but it was certainly my intent to pass on FC5. I didn't think there was going to be anything in it that required an upgrade..... Until now.


PHP
I am a PHP developer so the first thing I have to look at is how will an upgrade effect my development environment. FC5 comes with PHP 5.1 out of the box. PDO is an impressive addition to PHP 5.1, but I already have it running with 5.0.4 so alone PDO is not enough of a reason for me to upgrade. PHP 5.1 comes with a lot of security fixes but it also has broken quite a bit of my code written for 5.0.4. So PHP is not enough of a reason for me to upgrade.

MySQL
Technically this should only be a concern on the server side.  I often create little database applications for myself however (should start looking at SQLlite for this I suppose). MySQL together with PHP has long been my ticket to RAD and with tools like qcodo and symphony I need to have a reliable database on my desktop as well. FC5 will come with MySQL5.0.  5.0 was probably the most anticipated release of MySQL ever, due to the following new features

• Stored Procedures
• Triggers
• Views

Triggers, and stored procedures are nice, and I know quite a few database programers who would say that you don't have a "real" RDMS without them. Personally I've been coding around them for so long now that I no longer feel their absence. Lack of views and subqueries (fixed in 4.1) has been a thorn in my side however. I am *very* much looking forward to finally using views, in my LAMP applications. The fact that FC5 will allow me to do so "out the box" is a huge justification for moving.

Mono
Installing Mono on a Fedora Desktop has been a PITA in the past.  Now it will come with anaconda. As much fun as I'll have with MonoDev (and I do plan on playing with it alot), I'm not much of a C# programmer so don't anticipate needing it for any production code. The inclusion of Mono now means that several Mono based applications can also be included with FC5, Beagle, F-spot, Munie, Tomboy and many other apps.  Beagle and Tomboy I can justify as a work need, but I admit that with mono support I feel like a kid in a candy store. This is a brave new world for Fedora and I'm looking forward to playing with all the new goodies.

Xen
Xen is a virutal machine system, which will allow you to run multiple versions of Linux on one desktop. FC5 comes with Xen intergrated in the installer, so setting up multiple distros will be a snap. I have long dreamed of being able to set up the following on one computer
Desktop 1 - Fedora
Server 1 - Fedora
Server 2 - CentOS (for testing before deploying to my RHEL servers)
Desktop 2 - SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Xgl is just too kewl not to play with, also will help supporting Novell servers)
Desktop 3 - Ubuntu (apt-get distro of choice perhaps add CnR to this desktop for codec support)
All my personal files will be on a network drive so I can share between distros) nfs will proably be the way to go here but I may try iFolder instead.

Along with Crossover Office and perhaps Cedega this is the best of all worlds. Yes I'm certainly looking forward to Fedora Core 5.... lets see if I can advoid the FC 6 install.