A Few Laps With Fedora 22

To great fanfare, Fedora 22 was released to the wider world yesterday. And to those who awaited it with bated breath, it does not disappoint.

A word to the uninitiated: As many of you already know, in the broadest terms, Fedora is a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developments in Fedora – and there are many, leading to its cutting-edge reputation (which wrongfully scares some users from using it; more on this later) – sooner or later end up on RHEL for the commercial market.

Since the introduction of Fedora.next — the umbrella program for the roadmap for the distro going forward — the distro comes in three basic flavors: Workstation, Server and Cloud. Workstation is the desktop/laptop version — and workstation version for businesses. Cloud and Server are pretty self-explanatory.

Of course, there are different desktop spins for Fedora 22: Along with the default GNOME, desktops available for Fedora 22 include KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE-Compiz, and Sugar on a Stick, for those of you who want your Fedora experience to resemble what students see on their OLPC XO machines.

Many of the changes in Fedora 22 come in the Cloud and Server versions, though one change stands out across the board. DNF, an updated package manager that has been around in development since Fedora 18, finally makes its debut here, replacing Yum. DNF provides faster installs and updates while keeping the Yum command-line interface compatibility — but instead of “yum” you’ll be typing “dnf” on the command line. Pretty simple, no?

The Workstation default desktop, of course, is GNOME 3.16, and one standout feature for developers is the Vagrant development software, an open-source program for creating development environments across operating systems. One of the perks of Vagrant is that it does not require third-party virtualization tools to run.

Containers are the key component in the Cloud version. The Fedora 22 Atomic Host includes the Atomic command, a coherent entry point for managing hosts and containers. Updated versions of Cockpit, Docker and Kubernetes are included, and it’s now possible to run Fedora within a Docker container. The aforementioned Vagrant is featured in this version, too, which will enable developers to share work with others.

Added support for PostgreSQL and the addition of Rolekit — software which manages server roles — highlights the Server version. Fedora 22 Server also defaults to the XFS file system, a high-performance, scalable file system with a main feature of quicker crash recovery as well as allowing for maintenance windows, limiting downtime.

Test Drive: Fedora 22 Xfce

I’m in the driver’s seat of Fedora 22 Xfce because, well, it’s my desktop of choice. Your mileage may vary, of course, with whatever you use, and if it works for you, that’s great.

As I mentioned earlier, since Fedora is pretty much the test track on which Red Hat prepares its high-performance enterprise system, you might find some limitations to what’s available by default on each of the downloads; limitations that may not lend themselves to wider acceptance across the FOSS board. We get that, but at the same time it hamstrings Fedora, tragically. Not having things that are readily available on other distros may keep casual users away and perpetrates the silly myth that its “cutting edge” nature means it can only be used by experienced Linux users. The silver lining here, however, is it opens the door for quality distros like Korora, based on Fedora, to add the bells and whistles that Fedora lacks out of the box for wider FOSS acceptance.

That said, the download and install of the Xfce version was quick, with Anaconda behaving flawlessly. On the Xfce side of things, Fedora comes with the latest, Xfce 4.12, which has added a variety of plugins, including support of the Gtk 3 plugin, among other improvements.

As a long-time Fedora user, I do know the drill: Install, do the Flash install, and in the Xfce spin’s case, add some of the software that needs adding. Firefox replaces Midori — sorry, Midori folks — LibreOffice goes immediately on (please, Xfce spin folks, include LibreOffice as part of the default install; Abiword is nice, but LibreOffice is, well, miles ahead), and off we go.

Once the system is set up to my liking, the performance is nothing short of stellar. Downloads are quicker thanks to DNF — which stands for Dandified Yum (an unfortunate set of initials: at least you can make “tasty” jokes at Yum but DNF, in auto racing parlance, means Did Not Finish). Web surfing and the trappings that go with it, once the modifications are made, absolutely fly on my ThinkPad.

Conclusion

In a sentence, it’s another winner in a long line of winners from Fedora.

If you’re a Fedora user, you’ll love Fedora 22. If you’re not a Fedora user and want to try it, it’s worth the effort to get it to where you want it. The caveat here is that you may have to tweak it a bit to do what more mainstream distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu do out of the box. If you’re up to it, then go for it.