Fedora 25 review



As someone who started their Linux experience with a Red Hat Linux retail box set and switched to Fedora after Red Hat transitioned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their commercial product, I have been using Fedora for a long, long time. The cumulative changes since the first Fedora release have been considerable, but the list of changes for Fedora 25 is really quite short. Basically, the key points in the change log are newer versions of all the packages, Wayland by default, and Fedora Media Writer as the method for creating installation media. Below, I focus on each of those new features as I detail my first week using the latest release of Fedora.



Installing Fedora



Supplanting Fedora Live USB Creator, Fedora Media Writer is the new method for creating Live USB sticks. On the Fedora project's download page it is this application that is the item presented to Windows and macOS users as the primary download instead of offering them the ISO directly. Fedora users are informed that they can use the dnf package manager to install Fedora Media Writer. The download page also contains a link to the 1.3GB ISO for the 64-bit Workstation edition.





Fedora 25 -- The Fedora Media Writer

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Because I use a lot of virtual machines, I opted to download the ISO directly to have it on hand, but I used Fedora Media Writer's "Custom Media" option to create my Live USB installation media. However, had I decided to do so, Fedora Media Writer could have downloaded and created install media for most of the available Fedora 25 or Fedora 24 variants. Fedora Workstation and Server are predominantly featured, but clicking the item with three dots, which says "Display additional Fedora flavors" on mouse over, reveals options for all the "Fedora Spins" with alternate desktop environments and the "Fedora Labs" specialized variants (e.g., the Fedora Robotics Suite). The Fedora Atomic Host images seem to be the only omission.



Creating my install media using Fedora Media Writer was a breeze. Most Live USB creation tools work just fine, but Fedora Media Writer provides an extra bit of polish to the process. It even works well with ISO files from other projects. I even successfully created a bootable USB installer for TrueOS using it, so Fedora Media Writer is not limited to just Linux ISOs.





Fedora 25 -- The GNOME Shell desktop

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Once I had my Live USB drive ready, I rebooted my computer and Fedora started up. Fedora's default GNOME desktop was ready to use in a short time and I was presented with the option to try Fedora as a live desktop or install Fedora. I went straight for the install option, which launched Fedora's Anaconda installer.



Anaconda provides all the options required to install Fedora, and it works well enough, but it is not without flaws. Some of these flaws are Anaconda issues, mostly minor bugs that already have bug reports filed against them, but some are Fedora specific. The Fedora specific issues are the things that are a bigger deal to me. The default size of the root partition is just too small for my usage, which is probably not that atypical. Once I install all of the packages I want (which includes all of the texlive packages), I end up with only enough space a few virtual machine images stored under /var/lib/libvirt before I max out the root partition. I always end up customizing my partition scheme because of this, but in this era of huge hard drives, I would love it if the automatically created root partition on my 500GB hard drive was 100GB instead of 50GB. My other issue is fairly minor, but the Fedora project really, really needs to update some of the informational banner advertisements that are displayed during installation. The Workstation product installs LibreOffice by default, so a banner telling the user to "install LibreOffice" if they want create documents is misleading and possibly confusing. What is worse is the same banners display when installing Fedora Server, where installing LibreOffice makes little sense. Fedora Server adds a banner about Cockpit to the items it displays, so there is room for customization, but some of the default banners need to be pulled from variants that they do not make sense in.



The Fedora 25 experience



I will be honest, Fedora 25 is a very boring release. Everything is newer, but there are not a lot of new features. The biggest change is the switch to Wayland as the default display server (which I cover in more detail below), but just about everything else is just a version number bump. GNOME is now version 3.22. Firefox 49 is what came on the ISO, but the update to Firefox 50 is already available. Evolution, also version 3.22, serves as the default e-mail client. LibreOffice 5.2 rounds out the major software included by default.





Fedora 25 -- The Software application manager

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Plenty of additional software is available in Fedora's repositories, and the main tool for installing additional programs is the Software application. Using Software to install and update packages is really easy and the program, while simple, does provide a nice selection of programs and a usable search feature. However, Software is focused on GUI applications, so installing some packages requires using dnf in a terminal. While this is not awful, Software and dnf do not have a shared history, so the command "dnf history" will not show any transactions made by Software.



What is really nice about Fedora 25 is just how many programming languages are well supported by the distribution with up-to-date releases. I was able to easily set up support for C, C++, D, Java, Node.js, Python, Perl, R, Ruby, and Rust, with Rust being a new addition in Fedora 25. While I was certainly excited to see Rust packages included, I was disappointed that GnuCOBOL does not seem to be packaged for Fedora anymore.



The Fedora 25 experience is not perfect, and could use a few enhancements here and there, but it is really nice. However, there are numerous minor issues, and almost all of them can be traced back to Wayland.



GNOME on Wayland



The most significant change in Fedora 25 is the use of Wayland as the default display server. This change has been long promised, but the implementation has been frequently pushed back. Fedora 25 now defaults to using Wayland and, while perfectly usable, it is not perfect. After using Fedora daily since release, I have yet to find any issues that completely disrupt my work-flow, or make doing something important impossible, but there are a handful of issues that I ran across all the time. The first thing most people will notice is that the Videos application does not display video when in the Activities overview, instead it displays a solid gray window. This is not a major issue, but it is a missing feature. Other things that I have noticed are the fact that Files displays an extra blank line at the bottom of its right-click context menu that does not appear under Xorg and that LibreOffice messes up when returning from full screen mode. Under Xorg, when LibreOffice exits full screen mode, it properly restores to the size it was before, but under Wayland it reduces to a small window and, while this small window can be resized, it will no longer correctly maximize to use the full screen; it leaves a small gap on the right side of the screen.





Fedora 25 -- The Activities overview

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Despite some minor issues, Wayland is usable enough for me that I feel comfortable using it for everyday usage. I even installed a few open source games and only had minor issues. SuperTuxKart worked wonderfully, but only gave me two different screen resolution options, while running under Xorg provided me with a third. The two options provided under Wayland were the native resolution for my display and a 4:3 mode with the proper height for my display, so the lack of a non-native resolution for my display is almost a non-issue. ScummVM had a issue with displaying a half-inch strip of the desktop when playing full screen, but that has already disappeared. Though I have no idea if that was a Wayland issue or some other random glitch. I am not a huge gamer, but every open source game that I tried worked in Fedora 25's Wayland session without complaint or major issue. Granted, I am using Intel graphics, so others may have a vastly different experience.



Final thoughts



Even when dealing with the various Wayland oddities and issues, Fedora 25 is a great distribution. Everything is reasonably polished and the default software provides a functional desktop for those looking for a basic web browsing, e-mail, and word processing environment. The additional packages available can easily turn Fedora into an excellent development workstation customized for a developer's specific needs. If you are programming in most of the current major programming languages, Fedora provides you the tools to easily do so. Overall, I am very pleased using Fedora 25, but I am even more excited for future releases of Fedora as the various minor Wayland issues get cleaned up. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Ideapad 100-15IBD laptop with the following specifications: Processor: 2.2GHz Intel Core i3-5020U CPU

Storage: Seagate 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8723BE 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter

Display: Intel HD Graphics 5500