It’s been a number of years since I sat down and gave Fedora a spin; I’ve always leaned more towards some of the other distributions out there with features that more suited my style. However, with the release of Fedora 26 I thought perhaps I should give the very popular and powerful distribution it’s due diligence and see how it runs.
Fedora is the upstream source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and therefore is quite powerful by its very nature, and would be well suited to home users and server usage alike. Fedora is also known for what we call “Bleeding Edge” packages, which means in more simple terms that Fedora tends to use the absolute newest packages and features available for GNU/Linux Operating Systems.
This has both positives and negatives; such as always having the latest in technologies and features, but at the cost of potentially breaking your system, running into conflicts with other packages, etc.
Fedora 26
The Installation
One thing that I absolutely loved about the installation of Fedora was not actually even the installation itself, but rather the creation of the LiveUSB. Upon visiting the Fedora website and selection that I wanted the “Workstation” version, I was presented with a download for the “Fedora Media Writer” for Windows (I was on my Windows Partition at the time.)
Selecting this I found that the tool was extremely straightforward, it downloaded the ISO for me, and then all I had to do was insert my USB drive and click a button before, presto, the Live USB was made automatically. Granted it’s not hard to make a LiveUSB of a Linux Distro, but I’m all for the automation and ease of use!
Installation itself however was quite straightforward and painless. The graphical installer was simple, easy to navigate and fairly quick for the duration of the installation. The Installer now uses a new partitioning tool called Anaconda, and I am a fan right off the bat.
Inside the OS
Once I booted into Fedora I was greeted with the familiar GNOME Interface, which is now running GNOME 3.24. I was surprised with how barebones the system was by default however, typically when I install most distributions that aren’t super minimalist systems like Arch Linux, I am faced with a lot of bloat, more applications than I will ever use, etc. Fedora on the other hand came with the essentials and nothing further; a pleasant surprise I must say.
Fedora is also running GCC 7 for compilation, Golang 1.8 (Go is a programming language created by Google that is becoming more and more active in the programming world) as well as Python has been updated to 3.6.
Final thoughts
I spent a little bit of time poking around and messing with Fedora and I was pleasantly surprised with how smooth, easy to use, and problem free my trial run was; albeit it’s hard to find issues after only a couple of hours of use. I personally wouldn’t really recommend it for someone who just wants an “Install and go” Operating System loaded with a thousand bells and whistles and applications for everything under the sun.
However, if you want a powerful system, bleeding edge packages and updates, and the knowledge that you are using a system that helps to form likely the most popular and powerful commercial server / enterprise system in the GNU/Linux world, then give Fedora 26 a try!
How about you? Have you used Fedora or do you currently? What are your thoughts on the new release?
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