There was a GO / NO GO meeting earlier in the week and the Fedora 26 RC 1.5 build passed. As a result Fedora 26 will be officially released on Tuesday, July 11th. According to the original schedule, F26 was set to be released on June 6th. It got bumped 5 times during the alpha and beta phases but that pretty much always happens to this distro that is constantly leading the pack with innovation.

What are the new features? Check out the release notes and/or the changeset. There are quite a few changes to the installer. Just be aware there are a ton of normal updates beyond the changeset and I mean... how about that new desktop background? LXQT users will also be happy to have their own Spin now. Don't forget that Fedora appears to be supporting quite a few arches, some as primary and others as secondary. Not as many as Debian and Gentoo but still. Which arches? aarch64, armhfp, i386, ppc64, ppc64le, and x86_64. I'm only using the later myself.

I've been using Fedora 26 since before the alpha release. How is that? For many years now they have been producing nightly-builds if you knew where to look. I just took one of the nightly builds and did an install... and then crawled along updating all the way through alpha and beta to final. I mainly start early because I like to build my own remix with all of the desktop environments installed and the earlier I start the longer I have to work on perfecting it to my own tastes. Here's some instructions if you have any desire to make your own spin or remix. About the time the beta came out I started running F26 on my laptop and work machine exclusively. It has been stable for me the entire time.

My main home server machine is always the last to move to a new release and I just upgraded to F26 from F25 today. Since I have a lot of packages installed it did take a while. Let it be known that rpmfusion has had packages for F26 since around the alpha release and as a result I was able to just upgrade everything and not have to worry about removing much because third-party packages were missing... because they weren't. For a long time I have been a fan of clean installs but with the home server I have a particular application installed that has to pull down a ton of data post install if I were to do a clean install (plexmediaserver)... so I've been upgrading that machine with each release for quite a few releases now. Upgrades for me have been completely painless for several releases now. It helps when Linux / Fedora likes your hardware and you aren't using any proprietary drivers (no nVidia here).

Fantastic job Fedora Project! I also wanted to give a shout out to the fine fellows that make up the Respin SIG. They have been providing updated iso media for all of the Fedora Spins (including Workstation) for several releases now and generally make new ones every other kernel update, which in Fedora is quite often. I'm not sure everyone knows about the periodic refreshed media that they provide because they are mainly only promoted on Fedora Planet and the Fedora IRC channel. Keep up the good work! There are a ton up post-release updates for Fedora 26 already so I'm sure they'll be getting to work on refreshed F26 media RSN.