Fedora 26 released | Hacker News Reader

Fedora 26 released

fedoramagazine.org

160 pointsgtirloni81 comments

I am mainly a macOS user, but I keep around a Dell workstation for work that needs a lot of memory or cores. After years of primarily running Debian and Ubuntu, I switched the machine to Fedora 25 and upgraded to Fedora 26 during the beta cycle.

I was surprised how good Fedora is these days. The GNOME desktop is buttery smooth with Wayland and the Nouveau drivers on the relatively old Quadro that the machine has. Audio and suspend/resume worked out-of-the-box without any problems. Upgrades are very fast thanks to DNF and delta RPMs. Software also seems to get minor release updates within a release (e.g., I had some vim updates).

The Fedora installer also put / on a separate btrfs subvolume as it should (Ubuntu didn't do that in 16.04, not sure if they fixed that).

Great work Fedora folks!

I used Fedora years ago at 19 and 20 and it was great then. It worked and... Worked. The desktop came with sane defaults. It... Worked.

I would have worded this a bit different than you did.

But I too have shyed away from fedora the last few years.

I'm primarily a KDE user but I guess now is a good time to try fedora again if I get some time. (On my test vm now: latest Ubuntu with gnome. Also hoping to give solus/budgie a little more time.)

Please don't do this to yourself : I tried Fedora 25 KDE a few weeks ago and it was the buggiest POS I ever ran on my PC. Just customizing the taskbar gave me a black screen that even a reboot didn't solve.

For the record Fedora Gnome was rock stable on the same machine. The only reason I didn't keep it is that I need what I call a 'pinnable taskbar' (like Windows 7).

If you really want KDE you could try KDE Neon, still a bit buggy for my taste but at least it's usable.

After a few more distros I settled on Mint Cinnamon. Not bad but frankly I miss Windows.

Ok, you seem to have the same taste as me.

I'm currently on KDE Neon at home and at work until I switched jobs a couple of months ago and I also liked Mint Cinnamon a lot.

I have used Fedora + KDE for the past 5 years. Yes there are occasional issues but they are normally common to all distros which happen to use the same combination of components.

For me, I ran into a regression with compositing: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354146

After I disabled the desktop effects Fedora 25 was rock solid.

I haven't upgraded to F26, I normally wait a week or two to shake out any big issues.

You can use the "Dash to Panel" extension in Gnome to provide a Windows 7 like bottom panel. I discovered it recently, and it has made my Gnome experience 1000x better.

Other than the "Dash to Panel" extension mentioned by another user, you can also use the "Dash to Dock" extension to get pinnable taskbar (can be set to always visible / auto hide).

I no longer use them though (to get more screen space)

Did they fix the copy-paste issues between application with wayland in Fedora 26 (particular between terminal and the rest of the world)? But maybe that is a more of request for the GNOME guys...

Just tested copy and pasting on a fresh Fedora 26 install between gnome-terminal, gedit and Firefox: All directions worked fine :)

Nice. I had to move back to Xorg just because of that in 25. Time for an upgrade I guess :)

I've been a Ubuntu user for years, but I've just read the Fedora 26 announcement and followed the link through to Gnome 3.24 release notes (https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.24/). The 3rd headlighting major feature of this is "New Recipes Application". One word: Sold! I've been dreaming of the day Linux DE/WM got this core feature!

I think we can safely say 2017 will indeed be the year of Linux desktop, we got there, we've made it! (there is also minor footnotes for niche things like file managers, calendar and gfx config, if that's your thing)

There was me thinking it was some app configuration installation tool

There is a Recipes flatpak as well. So in principle (or perhaps by principle), you can run it in other distributions as well.

http://flatpak.org/apps.html

It's only taken us 48 years to catch up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer

Fedora has been great lately. QA is so much better than other distros. Things "just work".

Agreed. I readopted Fedora as my distro of choice around 19 and haven't looked back.

I've been using Fedora since they forked from RedHat for the simple reason that clicking "Next" through the installer or mashing F12 always did the right thing by default.

Ubuntu and Debian, by comparison, would always ask stupid questions that had even dumber defaults. Nothing would ever work unless you went out of your way to look things up.

The Fedora team has done a really great job of keeping the distribution coherent and functional even though they've fully embraced the "move fast and break things" mentality.

The only down-side to Fedora is they iterate really quickly and there's no LTS option, as that's what RedHat is for, but if you can turn over your installations on a regular basis (e.g. cloud servers) it's not really a big deal.

They didn't fork, RH just rebranded it.

Fedora is not identical to RedHat. It's more of a proving ground for new things that may or may not make their way back into RedHat Enterprise Linux.

It's not a simple rebrand. Fedora Core 1 took what was staged for RedHat 10 and packaged it with a different license and sent it off in a different direction.

> "and there's no LTS option, as that's what RedHat is for"

On the FOSS side, the LTS option would be CentOS

https://www.centos.org/

Seconded. I've been on Fedora for the last few months and it's had much less general bullshit and annoyance than recent Ubuntu's. Certainly looking forward to upgrading to Fedora 26.

Yes, it is my full time workstation. But, I do experience screen freeze once in a while when I am plugging external monitors.

I've been using Fedora since 23. I started using it because of work, but it quickly became my main OS. I've installed it on a MBP, and now an Alienware. Only have had a couple problems, on the MBP webcam didn't work. On the Alienware, I have to run a script to get the 3.5mm jack to work. Other than that, no problems. I enjoy using it, and its also really easy to upgrade. Prior, I was a life long Mac OS user (since the 6th grade lol).

So interesting... I gave up on Fedora around the "Beefy Miracle" silliness. I remembered seeing comment threads that combined community exasperation alongside genuine technical complaints. It's nice to see the team has rebuilt itself! Maybe I'll give 26 a spin in a VM.

Much better now. Red Hat has full time people working on it and the community is larger. I've heard that many of the people working on GNOME, systemd and the like use Fedora themselves, which certainly helps.

My favorite Linux distribution nowadays because I don't have to spend time fiddling with it.

I also really like spec files for packaging - they're really similar to PKGBUILD and similar formats.

I've been running it on my computers since Fedora 22, everything works out of the box on all the ThinkPads I've installed it on, and my desktop.

Gnome needs a few extensions to be usable, but its working great overall.

I was a bit cynical when GNOME started writing new 'modern' desktop apps. It seemed like a lot of wasted effort chasing Windows/Mac. Who really needs a native desktop maps app?

But I actually really like the new apps they've put together. They're simple, clean, and lightweight. I'm a bit surprised that they're made with GTK.

Still hate "hot corners," though.

I do agree about hot corners m.

Have used it for long time? It is really buggy. After awhile it literally slows down. I keep my workstation open for at 2 days and after 7,8 hours it gets slower and slower m.

And sometimes it crashes badly. That should not happen with desktop environment.

Do you use extensions? I've experienced this (in Fedora 21 to 23) but since I stopped using extensions, I haven't had a single crash. I usually run one session on the laptop for 5 days straight.

I am not going to use gnome with out extensions . Never ever ;)

During login try picking X.org instead of Wayland, you probably have something that doesn't play nice with Wayland yet.

One vote in favour of hot corners here. As long as they are implemented in a reasonable way.

I saw some articles saying fedora 26 might land with fractional scaling for Hdpi screen. Any news regarding this? if it lands somewhere is there any way to know about it? I'll be very keen to switch back to Linux when my main laptop will have good support for this

Gnome 3 has been dpi independent from day 0, so what are you talking about?

DPI independent, but requires whole number scaling (1x, 2x, not 1.5x)

And WINE still won't scale.

I'll buy a Chuwi HiDPI laptop for any developer who can make HiDPI on Linux suck less.

Unfortunately it will be a feature of GNOME 3.26 or 3.28, so Fedora 27 or later.

It kinda works. Font scaling in Gnome .24 allows for fractional coefficients, and it works for 98% of cases (I have a single HiDPI display; I have heard it doesn't work as well for multiple displays).

Everyone is praising GNOME here. Am I the only one who thinks that it's not polished enough? I'm using it on my laptop and it kind of works most of the time. But there are occasional bugs arising here and there. I even sometimes think that I'm the first user otherwise how come nobody noticed those (sometimes very obvious) bugs. If 26 isn't fixing them, apparently I'll have to move back to the Cinnamon spin.

No, you are not alone.

Or at least I spotted a number of usability issues last time I tried gnome (last week, latest Ubuntu).

I think GNOME 3 has come a long way but years later I'm still bothered by their killing type-ahead navigation in the file dialog and replacing it with search -- however useful searching may be (and despite recent improvements), it slows me down greatly, and often leads to mistakes, when I know where something is and simply want to navigate to it.

Plenty of discussion about this [0] [1] but the GNOME devs don't want it back, for various reasions.

Ubuntu has always patched it back in, but it looks like they will drop it in 17.10 if nobody steps up to maintain the patch [2].

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721968

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666...

Yes, i got some little things here and there, but in general it's a very good experience working in gnome these days and fedora took it to a whole new level of polish.

I switched away from Ubuntu and to Fedora quite a few cycles ago because at the time they supported systemd by default and I wanted specifically to use systemd-nspawn. I found that it was a very solid and stable GNOME 3 distribution and that it had the best implementation of GNOME 3 between it and Ubuntu GNOME.

Now that Ubuntu is going to switch to GNOME I might eventually switch back but idk yet.

The one gripe I have with fedora is that dnf is much slower than apt.

There's (supposedly) a C version being created, but it's a pain to keep up to date with its progress.

http://dnf.baseurl.org/2016/02/24/dnf-into-c-initiative-star...

The best part of fedora 26 is built in f.lux /redshift. No need to install or setup third party apps. Just that feature makes it worth it

I didn't know this was a feature, just enabled it now and it seems to work great!

I have mixed feelings on it. GNOME Nightlight only exists because a number of people complained that the lack of screen-temperature API made Redshift on Wayland impossible.

On the one-hand, the feature is incredibly useful, and great to have it included in all GNOME installs.

On the other hand, this is exactly what Google and Apple did when they kicked apps like f.lux out of the appstore, and then rolled out their own built-in blue-light blockers.

If your end goal is making the feature available to as many people as possible, then great. But from the perspective of a small developer, however, "OS vendor forbade my software on their platform, then ripped it off and baked their own version into the OS" leaves something of a bad taste in my mouth.

this is untrue for Gnome. Because Gnome made the api available .. its still not in their javascript api . But people have created early redshift forks for wayland: https://github.com/Lourens-Rich/redshift/commit/295c8fa7ef53...

Man its annoying that this kind of stuff is specific to the DE not OS.

I find XFCE to be perfect for my workflow but would love this utility.

It would be specific to the OS, as long as we stuck to X11. But with the move to Wayland, there will be pr-compositor reimplementations...

Doesn't Redshift work for you? It's not GNOME specific.

https://fedoramagazine.org/safe-eyes-redshift/

So what's the Linux remote desktop story these days? It seems like modern versions of GNOME running on Wayland don't support VNC?

There is an RDP backend for Wayland: https://241931348f64b1d1.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/waylands-r...

There is a SPICE backend: https://github.com/ein-shved/compositor-spice

There is the Samsung effort Wayland Over Wire (WOW): https://blogs.s-osg.org/wow-wayland-over-wire/

Apparantly, the Pipewire effort to make a high performance, low latency audio/video server will address remote display somehow too: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-workstation...

x2go.org

I really want to know about how this is solved in Wayland. I've still seen nothing that beats X11 forwarding with compression (nomachine nx), but not only are nomachine not supporting it anymore, nobody seems interested in taking up the torch.

Try xrdp:

dnf install @"Cinnamon Desktop" cinnamon-session xrdp xorgxrdp

The only downside in Fedora 25 - software rendering in your X-RDP session

Congratulations Fedora!

Everyone is praising the GNOME (default) edition. Does anyone use the KDE spin? Also, how are Fedora version upgrades nowadays? I'm trying to decide between KDE neon and Fedora.

I've used the KDE spin since GNOME 3 came out, and I love it. I wouldn't dream of going back.

I guess this means it now gets enough attention? Last I tried (n years ago) it felt like a second class citizen.

I would stick with KDE neon unless there is something that you cant live without in Fedora. The KDE developers and enthusiasts seem to be rallying around KDE neon so it's only going to get better and it has a hybrid rolling release model which is nice.

I upgraded from Fedora 25 to 26 alpha a few months ago and even then the process was smooth and the resulting system stable.

Haven't tried the KDE spin but I did try KDE neon briefly earlier this year. Quite slick but I quickly ran into broken package dependencies when trying to install some random stuff I needed (QGIS and sqlitebrowser IIRC); apparently it's been an open bug since September last year [0]. Didn't leave me with a good first impression but I'm rooting for the project - KDE is fantastic these days.

[0] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368792

In my many adventures testing out all the Plasma based distro's, OpenSUSE was the most stable and polished version of Plasma available right now.

KDE Neon is wonderful IMO.[0] I like the Ubuntu base but I never liked Kubuntu and I really didn't like Unity so I never used it much after they left Gnome 2.

[0]: but then again I always liked KDE except the 4.x series which was too experimental IMO.

Been using KDE on Fedora for almost 8 years now. It's been mostly a smooth experience.

Personally I would recommend it to any KDE fan.

I'm using a lab that is built on top of a KDE spin. I really disliked GNOME, and I was a LXDE user for many years.

For me, KDE has been working great. It has sane hot-keys, fully customizable, fast, and good looking.

I've had no issues with upgrades on Fedora yet.

I love Fedora 25, but according to this thread[1], Firefox doesn't work out of the box in Fedora 26? Seems like a big oversight...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6mjb7j/fedora_26_tor...

Haven't experienced any problems so far.

I haven't had a single issue with Firefox (54) out of the box. I know that some add-ons can break the multi-process windows feature, but out of the box has been fine, both with clean VirtualBox installs and bare-metal desktop installs.

As far as I can see, that's a configuration- or user-specific problem. I haven't seen any reports. Firefox (or, more technically, "the default browser") must work in order to meet our release criteria.

Still no Wayland with Nvidia drivers. Yes, I have read perhaps too much about GBM/EGLStream debate, but right now I am out of luck with my GTX1080 :(

(And, frankly, Wayland guys are wrong and Nvidia is right.)

To the parenthetical part of your post: I thought Wayland and NVidia sorted out their differences several months ago and agreed to write a new protocol that addressed the valid concerns of both parties.

Been hearing a lot of positive feedback from Fedora lately. Wondering how good the KDE integration is before trying it out though ( no machine to spare). Anybody have some experience with KDE and Fedora, in particular!at Wayland and multi monitor support?

Ever since Ubuntu went all NIH with Mir and Unity, I looked for other desktops to recommend to people who want something that "just works". The wishlist includes non-breaking upgrades and not changing interface unnecessarily.

There are a few modern distributions like Mint and Elementary, but none pay much attention to upgrades. Fedora Workstation it is. The tools have matured a bit since esr's wife famously wanted to use her printer with it.

The past four or five years with it have been pretty uneventful, just as was hoped.

Solus is very, very good. The default version uses their own desktop, but they also offer a solid GNOME edition and are preparing a KDE edition as well.

I am a long-time Fedora user, and very fussy about Linux desktops, but would now recommend Solus over Fedora for most people: it is almost as polished, more simple to manage, faster on modern hardware, and has newer software packages whilst staying away from the bleeding edge technologies that Fedora promotes. For example, the move to Wayland is great, but if you just want a system that works, you don't want a distribution that enables it by default just yet.

I've been running Fedora 24/25 on my Macbook Air for the better part of the past year. It has been fantastic, and I don't see myself going back to OSX anytime soon. I intend to upgrade to F26.

I've been using Debian Stretch (which was previously Debian Testing) for the last 2 years. I didn't ever have a single problem. But as the months passed I kept getting miffed about old packages. Yes, there are backports etc, but it just didn't feel current enough. I loved the stability though.

When the difference in Firefox versions got to 50 vs 54, and I had written myself a custom bash script to keep Firefox updated, I went looking...

I've been running F26 since the early alpha days, and I have to say that I haven't had a single problem in that whole time. I've been running it on my brand new i7 desktop machine as well as a 7 year old HP laptop. Both have been superb. Performance of Gnome 3.24 is great. Stability of the platform as a whole is rock solid.

In fact, the only issue I have come across is with MakeMKV (which I have written about elsewhere). Other than that, all of my use cases have been rock solid. For reference, they include:

* Firefox (with Lastpass, uBlock origin, HTTPS everywhere, privacy badger add-ons)

* Evolution (for email, contacts, and calendar)

* taskwarrior

* ledger (with some hledger experimentation)

* Gnucash

* MakeMKV (for creating MKV files for my LibreElec HTPC)

* Shotwell (for my 15,000 file photo library)

* Quodlibet (for my 140GB music library - including a growing FLAC library)

* vim (for all my writing)

* git (for my writing and my code)

* Krita (with a Wacom tablet for illustrations for some book ideas I have)

* gimp (for image editing. e.g. I mocked up a photo of my house with how it might look with a grape vine covered pergola)

* Libreoffice (including my wife using it for her study, opening and editing MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files from the Uni)

* Ardour & Calf Plugins for music recording. I also experimented with BitWig, which was fantastic, but I prefer to support OSS.

* Golang (1.8, for my own personal development projects)

* Postgres (for same)

* qemu and virt-manager (for virtual machines)

I was a Microsoft .NET developer for almost 20 years. I've been a Linux user in my own time for a bit over 5 years. I'm now happy to say that I use Linux 100% for every single computer related task I have, and I couldn't be happier.

So far, the move to F26 has been fantastic, and it gets my highest recommendation to anyone else that might be considering it.

P.S. I also happily use F26 for the occasional 0AD game :)

Does Wayland work with proprietary nVidia drivers yet?

See https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-workstation...

tl;dr no.

Fedora is a fine Linux distro (as are many others).

I was hoping to see an update on the RISC-V port. Fabrice has made it easy to try to the early F25 in the browser (see, https://vfsync.org/vm_list.html) and I'd really love to see RISC-V becoming an officially supported architecture now that the privileged spec is frozen (that is, will evolve in a backwards compatible way).

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