Today Fedora 14 (Laughlin) was released. Two of the most notable features for desktop users are the inclusion of libjpeg-turbo and a tech preview of GNOME Shell. libjpeg-turbo increases opening, closing & saving times of JPEG images. The Fedora project claims it can actually halve the times. And well the GNOME Shell could be very cool to check out.
You can download Fedora 14 here or view the release notes here.
Ubuntu for Beginners & Beyond 