We recently interviewed William Beauford and Bryan Rhodes on how they use Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

Who is William Beauford?

William Beauford is a software developer. He currently works on a video communication platform for inmates. The program allows inmates to communicate with their friends and family. He started using Linux in high school. He started with Ubuntu mostly as an on and off again hobby. William switched to Linux full time in 2015.

William is inspired by Chris Jericho. “I’ve always admired how Chris Jericho traveled the world learning many different styles to create his own. I try to mirror that by learning different programming languages, frameworks, etc. to build up my skill set.”

William values loyalty, honesty, passion, compassion and guile. His favorite food is hamburgers. The Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight are his favorite movies.

Who is Bryan Rhodes?

Bryan Rhodes is a software engineer who works for an inmate communication company. “I am the lead software engineer for a video visitation system that allows inmates to visit with their loved ones at home through messaging and WebRTC video chats,” Bryan stated. He has been in the industry for four years and really enjoys his job. “I think my favorite part of our product is that our entire platform runs on 100% Linux.”

Bryan started using Linux in 2004. His first distribution was Fedora Core 2. He danced between several different distributions before settling on Fedora. “I started off using Fedora Core 2 and switched between Slackware, Gentoo and Ubuntu 4.10. I eventually settled with Fedora Core 5 and have used it primarily over the years except for on production servers where I use CentOS.”

Bryan hopes that when he ages he still has a strong passion for technology like his childhood hero Steve Wozniak. “I really love his curious mind, hacker outlook and that personable feeling you get from watching his interactions with people around him. I hope that as I age, I age with a continued love for technology like he has.”



Bryan’s favorite food is sushi. “My wife and I have a routine of eating sushi for our date nights and destressing after a long week, so I enjoy it for the taste and the quality time.”

His latest fascination and hobby is drones. “I have been using drones and Raspberry Pi’s to create geospatial maps of areas. Right now I am working on mapping my family’s 840 acre farm to give later generations an idea of how it has changed over time.”

The Fedora community

William is impressed with how easy it is to find a solution. “Most of the time, someone has already been through the issue you’re experiencing and knows exactly how to fix it,” he says.

Bryan is impressed with how fast Fedora innovates and patches. He said, “I think one of the things that really stuck out to me with Fedora so many years ago was when Xen was first growing and gaining traction. Fedora seemed to develop and innovate more features along with quickly patching bugs than any other OS out there.” Bryan and William would like to see Fedora become a rolling release.

What hardware?

William recently built his own gaming PC. It is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti video card. His currently laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X201 equipped with a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. William says, “This laptop has had the best compatibility I’ve ever seen during my experience. It’s a little old but it gets the job done and I’m looking forward to upgrading to a Dell XPS 13 when the time comes.”

The Ryzen 7 machine is equipped with a Fractal Design Celsius S36 AIO cooler. It has 16GB of Cosair Vengeance Ram, a Gigabyte GA-AX370 Gaming 5 and an Asus ROG STRIX GTX 1080TI. The case is a red NZXT H440. Beauford is a big Star Wars fan, so the hostname is Kylo-Ren.

Bryan also uses a Lenovo. “I am currently running an older, but stable, Lenovo x201 Tablet laptop.” The laptop is equipped with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. He says, “It does everything I need it to do while also being lightweight.”

What Software?

William is currently running Fedora 25. William uses VSCode with an Emacs plugin to write the majority of his code. He says, “To spice up my mundane bash shell I use Powerline to give it a little more personality.” He adds Dash to Dock and Applications Menu extensions to his GNOME desktop.

Bryan runs Fedora 25 on the X201. “I write all of my code in VSCode these days after many of years of using Emacs in my GNOME terminal,” he says. He likes VSCode because Java, Golang, PHP and SQL plugins are easy to install. All of his code is packaged into Docker containers. The containers are pushed to a Docker registry running on top of CentOS and then into a Kubernetes cluster.