Fedora 23 released
fedoramagazine.org
fedoramagazine.org
There are liveusb (for macbooks as well) - really encourage everyone to give it a spin without installing. This is really the future of the Linux desktop.
For the actual changes go here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/23/ChangeSet
you are right, it is not the first release to have access to each... but IMHO the first release where everything works seamlessly. YMMV.
For example, one in which packages do not conflict because they are installed in a directory for each package, and there is an "alternatives" mechanism for any global choice.
* http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html
* http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html
Their major problem was the idea that one had to register things with what was to most of the world just some bloke on another continent. But they had concepts like a hierarchical package naming scheme ("admin/", "mail/", &c.), self-contained build trees with versioned names, symbolic links to denote "currently selected version", and an "index"/"alternatives" directory full of symbolic links.
I'm one of the Guix hackers, and we're about to make a new release announcement today, so I encourage you to check it out: http://gnu.org/software/guix
Feature changes are ok on release upgrades.
is there something cool that you get from Arch ? I mean, I pretty much installed Fedora over Ubuntu because I wanted bleeding edge Gnome and Wayland to play with.
The install experience is still entirely manual. However, the hardest part is deciding on the more contentious components, such as the choice of filesystem(s), partition scheme, and bootloader.
The actual install process is simply following the install guide, typing commands, and occasionally delving into the wiki to learn how to configure the more esoteric components, should you choose to use them.
Granted, this is far above what most normal people can or want to do, and that's fine. Other distros exist, with real installers, and they make mostly-sane choices for you.
> is there something cool that you get from Arch ?
- A system completely customized to your software tastes. You can do this with Fedora and Ubuntu after the fact, but you're not building those systems from the ground up.
- Unadulterated software. Arch keeps downstream patching to an absolute minimum. I'm running Gnome, not Gnome patched hundreds of times over to work with hundreds of external dependencies.
- A huge and well-maintained repository of unofficial software packages. Again, you get this with the popular distros, but Arch has a very decent canonical experience compared to them. I personally did not like dealing with PPAs to get user-packaged software on Ubuntu, for example.
- Current software. I run mainline kernels and the latest open-source graphics drivers with what I consider to be a reasonable testing buffer. What I consider reasonable is most likely not what others consider reasonable.
I have no idea, I installed my current Arch 3 or 4 years ago and kept it updated since then. I do not remember it being difficult at the time.
"is there something cool that you get from Arch ?"
Everything is up to date, I love the package manager and the AUR (the user contributed "packages" in the form of instructions to build a package) w/ devel packages (ie you can easily install git versions of some software.) I use yaourt as a front-end. I use it to manage configuration files (and manually merge upstream config files with my locally modified files.)
The distro feels lightweight (I'm not using any DE, only Xmonad, so that may help), and there's not too much "magic", in the sense that you can easily find everything in config files. It kinda feels like a BSD system in that regard.
I'm learning Haskell and lots of up to date packages are available in Arch, I would not be surprised if Arch is one of the most popular distros among Haskell devs.
The Arch wiki has every bit of information you need for the initial setup, then reading Arch's website main page before a "big" update should be enough (they post instructions for important migrations there, when the upgrade could require some manual intervention.)
It really depends on how you define "experience". For me, I like the manual installation procedure like everything else on Arch. Sure, it is not "easy". But the point is that you are taught to do things with standard Linux tools, save the package manager and a few straightforward shell scripts.
Arch doesn't give you all sorts of fancy, "automated", distro-specific tools to make your life easier, because easy life is a temporary illusion in the fast-changing -- and by consequence, always broken -- world that is Linux desktop. Automated tools that made you life easier yesterday will likely make your life harder tomorrow, due to all the changes in upstream software these tools try to hide. Keeping such tools up to date will require continued interest in the development, something Linux desktop community never really succeeded to deliver.
Arch just puts you in the real, wild landscape of Linux desktop. It may not be comfortable at first, but that's how Linux desktop is.
Wayland is quite good in Fedora 23 now. The GNOME Maps app works now (it uses 3D) on my Radeon R9 290x. It didn't work in Fedora 22. I'm running Wayland now as my daily driver.
I personally love Pacman. For some reason, Ubuntu always ends up creating conflicts that I can't manually resolve (when installing things outside of the official repositories). I never get those issues with AUR. If you have time, give it a try; otherwise, don't lose sleep over it. You always have Manjaro (albeit I think it uses different repositories) or Antergos (not sure about this, either. I remember reading about a distro that used the official Arch repos, but can't remember the name).
The software availability is the biggest reason I use it, pretty much everything that could be installed is available through the main repos or AUR.
Worked fine. The Arch wiki has pages dedicated to Macbooks if you need help.
The only issue I had with macbooks was the wifi card was not detected by the installer after booting from USB. It works fine after installing a package using pacman once you get internet. So I always keep a cheap $10 Netgear USB wifi for installs which always works by default.
Most people who have issues with installing Arch are almost always just new to Arch or Linux. I had a lot of issues starting out with Arch but after the first 6 months learning curve I rarely had issues.
I have been using it for over two years now on a daily basis, across multiple Macbook and Thinkpads models and custom desktop build. It has been very stable and though most software versions are often 1-2 yrs ahead of Debian/Fedora.
I actually had way more problems while using Fedora for two years prior than I ever did with Arch. The Arch package library (AUR), wiki, and pacman provide a very strong foundation for using Linux as a desktop.
I had a painful experience a while ago trying to install Arch on my mac. It kept freezing up, so I had to give up as I had a load of other things to do.
I would really like to have another bash at getting Linux going on it.
Specific Mac images, or the main live USB image works on Macs?
I was considering installing the distro Elementary OS or Ubuntu. Do you think that Fedora can be a good option too? Which of the three is best for that user case?
A thing to consider is that her laptop is a bit old, from 2005-2010 I think. I remember that has 2 GB of RAM. She upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and say that now runs faster than before. The new OS shouldn't run slower than Windows 10.
I'm on a decision paralysis because on Elementary OS I see most simplicity (OS X in mind), in Ubuntu more speed and trust that is not going to crash (large user base), and now I discover Fedora and see that can have a good mix of both.
Let me know what you think. Thanks!
Links: http://elementary.io http://ubuntu.com/desktop http://getfedora.org/en/workstation/
It really depends on your use case. I've heard quite a bit positive feedback about elementary OS for "computer illiterate" (parents, old people, etc). It seems to "just work" for them after installation (bear with me I really can't judge about "ease of use" after years with Linux) and it's running on Ubuntu LTS versions. You're running apt-get to install security fixes, the current version of Firefox/Chrome and fixes provided by the elementary OS team, and that's basically it.
Fedora on the other hand is "the latest hot thing". It has by far the best GNOME3 integration and it previews technical features worked on by Red Hat and GNOME. It also features recent kernel versions which might be important for new-ish hardware. All that is quite awesome for technical-minded people like me. I'd like to say "it's unstable", but in my experience, it's not. I did not do the 22 -> 23 transition yet though. You have to do some additional work for the frequent new versions (backup everything in case it breaks, try the transition, etc). You also have to fiddle around with GNOME addons, font rendering and media codecs (RPMFusion as third-party provider) to make it usable as "personal computer" IMHO.
In the end it's up to you. I do believe your mom will be able to work with both (you'll need to tweak GNOME a bit IMHO, but that's up to discussion I guess), but you'll have to deal with different administrative workloads.
With Fedora, a new version comes out every 6 months and you receive updates for around a year. Elementary seems to release a new version roughly every two years and at least the Ubuntu LTS basis receives updates for much longer (~4-5 years, depending on the release time of eOS).
So I think that unless you want to upgrade the installation regularly (which is something that an inexperienced user probably should not do on his/her own, since a lot of things can potentially go wrong), choosing something with a longer support window is a good idea.
One thing that really irks me about the OS is the designers' reluctance to actually let you customize anything. For instance, the lack of a minimize button really bothered me, and I ended up having to install a third-party program called elementaryTweaks just to restore that functionality. The designers have outwardly refused to incorporate any of that and have repeatedly defended the decision to not give us a minimize button:
http://blog.elementary.io/post/131034577721/will-any-of-the-...
http://blog.elementary.io/post/130282384916/i-was-wondering-...
To me, that reeks of Apple's walled-garden "We know better than you do what you want" attitude.
Now here's the thing though: There's a different between Apple's walled-garden and elementary OS. You are very much able to tweak your elementary OS setup in any way you want. It's Linux after all. It's your system. We try to discourage tweaking a newcomer's system via commands learned on a blog post because they're old, outdated or plain wrong / bad. elementary-tweaks was not maintained at all for a long time as well. And there are quite a bit customizability options out there hidden in dconf. That's what elementary-tweaks is a frontend to after all, basically.
I understand it's a bit frustrating to not see the customizability in a Linux distribution you're used to from others. You're not exactly the target audience for elementary OS and I'm sorry for that.
And to be honest, there's another spin to it: More customizability means more features maintained in the source code. And quite frankly, sometimes we're really short of developers (I'm not contributing anything at all currently as I'm kind of busy with my apprenticeship). If nobody is going to maintain a new feature, it's not going to be in the code because it will break one fine day and it's adding work to the "to-fix" list.
The idea of the easy-to-use "just works" setup for the non-tinkerers, on the other hand, starts to resemble Apple; unfortunately, I don't think you can out-Apple Apple. That's their thing. The "stunning," almost condescendingly simple GUI that people "not good with computers" flock to. It's almost as though your target audience is my mother, or the people on whose behalf I will install this OS onto their aging desktop/laptop because they found re-learning Windows 8.1/10 too confusing.
gedit was always very intuitive and easy to use, but then they decided that such ease of use and intuitiveness was too confusing/distracting, so reduced the GUI even further to be completely useless: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-fac...
I am all for reducing complexity where necessary, but removing GUI elements to force additional clicks to get to any commonly used tools (where is the toolbar? where's the save button?) is foolish, particularly under the guise of "reducing distractions".
The speedometer in a car is not a distraction - it's a feature. As is the rev counter, the accelerator pedal and brake.
But if we apply the GNOME feature-cull approach to a car's cockpit, all we'd have is the glass in front of us, and possibly a steering wheel (debatable).
Nobody needed a manual for the toolbar in gedit - they knew what the save button did. It did not need reducing in complexity, as it wasn't complex in the first place.
Having said this, I will give this new F23 release a go, but you guys lost me as a GNOME3 user after the forced simplification and feature-removal since GNOME2. I hung on with GNOME2 for as long as I could. Of course, nobody cares what I carry on using so it's only a problem for me :-)
Now, this isn't meant nastily only a disappointment at the reduction in features/useful UI elements for no apparent reason.
9/10 - Would penguinise again.
For parents and other relatives I've installed Ubuntu, though. Mostly because it's seen an incomparable amount of third party support. Spotify, Chrome, and some other tools publish Ubuntu repositories, so those things Just Work.
You can then set up them with whatever desktop you find useful, but the farther you stray from vanilla default the more you risk things to break on upgrading, and you're the one doing the support. How do you know something called "Elementary" can even be upgraded? That it'll be around in five years? I briefly look at Mint, as it was essentially Ubuntu, but they don't support upgrades at all.
So I'd say install Ubuntu or Fedora, and go with what you know and what has the most users. Do all the upgrades yourself when you have time for it. They're usually straightforward, but might inform the user of things or ask questions a casual user is not prepared to understand.
heaven forbid the neighbor typing a to-do list on a linux laptop by the pool would have to physically get up and show the list to her mate who's web surfing on Win8 in the air conditioned den :-) And a lite samba server would not have been a good solution in this setup. Dukto transfer rate appeared to hover around 25MB/s.
I don't see a big advantage in Elementary when it comes to simplicity. GNOME itself ain't exactly overloaded with options, it's just that E tries very hard to appease the Mac folks. So it's mostly aimed at already computer literate minimalists, more than the computer semi-literate. I'm also not too excited about the support, even compared to other alternative desktops.
And with GNOME extensions & tweaks, it's quite easy to adapt to different usage patterns, e.g. if someone really wants desktop icons, a fixed dock or a taskbar.
I was really surprised about how easy it went. Definitely recommend it. And if something goes wrong that you don't know anything about (odd hardware probs, software you're not using yourself), it's always easier to find help for Fedora and Ubuntu distros and default desktops.
Someone should really make a distro spin intended for relatives and friends, where everything just comes ready with remote support, desktop sharing etc.
I'm thinking about this as well. My mother uses Windows 7 with Firefox, Thunderbird for mail, LibreOffice and Windows Photo Gallery. I think Ubuntu LTS with the Unity desktop is the best choice. Mint is an option.
In my experience Fedora/Centos is much more work installing applications. That may be my lack of experience with using Centos for desktop. If it's only about the browser, it won't matter much, and then your experience is leading.
I have a Lenovo laptop with 2GB RAM and Ubuntu 14.04 installed on SSD. It stalls many times. You need 4GB RAM. It will work on that laptop, but with issues, probably the same issues she has now. Better buy a new cheap laptop and make sure it has at least 4GB RAM.
Be careful with UEFI - it can cause many headaches when you want to install Linux. It took me more than a month to get it working.
Last tip: Try to find a laptop that has a proven record to work with Linux. Not all laptops qualify, have a modified motherboard or graphics card etc. The old laptop can be tested with a live stick.
Upgrade the PC (SSD or more RAM) I think is not an option, because if she/I spend any money/time on that is better to buy a new one, buy individual parts on my country is a little bit expensive.
+1 to Ubuntu on my list :) I will try with the Live CD/Stick if the PC qualifies.
I'm not sure if you are aware, but Linux allows you to run any desktop as a liveUSB. This means that you plug a specially created USB drive (that take 5 minutes) into your PC and boot from the USB drive. You get to try out the Desktop for as long as you like and it does not touch the OS that is installed on your hard disk. Its a great and addictive way to try out a lot of different Linux flavors!
Happy to hear if anyone knows if stability has improved since then.
For my mom, I use an Ubuntu LTS :)
Now I would rather advice to go Debian w/ Mate desktop. Debian testing is stable and very reasonable, Mate seems golden middle between XFCE/GNOME/Cinnamon.
I have to set priorities on each OS to test, I don't have too much time to install/test different distros. Also I don't want to make her try many distros and have to experience different learning curves, she will hate me and say "fuck off with your nonproprietary software and bring me back to Windows 10" hahah.
I just downloaded 23 and it worked like a charm. I'm not sure how much this upgrade affects me, but it is nice to see how nothing was lost (maybe it is my illusion, but programs seem to load a bit faster?). Good job to everyone who commits to this project.
While I wish Fedora was a rolling release, I'm happy that the upgrade was easy and didn't take very long.
as a fairly long time arch user, may you please describe areas where you find arch to be deficient w.r.t fedora ? i haven't tried using redhat for while, but when i did earlier, i just found rpm, and later yum, to be quite cumbersome to work with. thanks !
I only used yum on CentOS, and I thought it was okay. Fedora now comes with DNF which is pretty close to pacman.
Don't get me wrong, I like Arch a lot still and have no complaints, but I felt like Fedora struck a nice middle ground, and is, by default, very close to how I set up my Arch system anyways, even closer with the LXDE spin.
edit to add: I still use the Arch documentation for just about everything. That's one area that no one can say Arch is deficient on.
That's debatable. I don't consider the latest upstream versions "stable", no matter what they think - I've been using Linux long enough to know this the hard way. I think for people new to Linux (and for people experienced in Linux that don't like bugs too) a more conservative distro like Ubuntu LTS or Debian works much better in the long run.
EDIT: Please note, my experience may or may not relate on CentOS7 or RHEL7, this was more CentOS 5 and early 6 versions where I ran into issues.
Last time I tried Fedora was the previous version and I found it impossible to install codecs. You have to add third-party repository (rpmfusion), the problem I'm having is the way the repo is authenticated - http website points to a pgp key signed by one Corey Sheldon who appears to be only self-signed, so there is no way to establish chain of trust.
I could download the key from multiple sources but I don't feel I should have to and more than that, I don't trust people who to some degree rely on security theatre, which http page pointing to a lonely public key essentially is. It's no better than downloading over plain http and my slight OCD compels me to refuse to do that.
I realize this is more a rant about rpmfusion than Fedora, but then I feel essential support for playing various media files should be included within desktop OS.
It's also lacking netbeans in the repo which is kind of a hassle for me.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/3o6ijr/trying_fedor...
Also as someone very new to Fedora is there a crash course on DNF? Funny how lost I felt without apt-get.
Switched to Elementary(Ubuntu based distro) combined with docker repo now.
In my opinion, FC is more suited to lightweight work (email, word, spreadsheet).
For reference, I'm using Retina MacBook Pro Mid 2012 (10,1), but I was unsuccessful on my Dell Latitude E Series (the exact model escapes me at the moment) also and gave up.
Although you could just do a dnf install @kde-desktop and choose KDE at the login screen instead of Gnome
Also, people who laugh at every conspiracy theory could use one or two good history books about 20th century to see how much conspiracies really DID HAPPEN in the past.
Personally I think the governments of the world are run by giant inflatable pink pigs and the media covers it all up.