
Fedora 27 released - gtirloni
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-27/
======
dualogy
Major props to the Fedora project, really gotta get this off my chest as I had
Yet Another "distro-hopping just still ain't worth it even in 2017" moment
yesterday.

Somehow I have accumulated 4 laptops still-in-running-condition currently.
Every rare once in a while, on a lazy weekend or when caught with a cold, I
feel I should experimentally check out other distros and/or DE/WM combos than
the singular one that has proven time and again for me to work-out-of-the-box,
on any machine, after a swift painless install, without headaches hickups or
troubles: Fedora with Gnome 3 (manually tweaked down to ultra-minimalism later
on of course --- wouldn't mind i3 but guess what, it just freezes out-of-the-
box, and the others seem to be abandonware).

Whether it's some some Arch or some Suse, Xfce DE or i3 or other WM.. it
always either bugs out severely right in the live environment or during their
install, or immediately after.

Great for tinkerers, but my reasoning always immediately jumps to "meh I have
enough own code-bases to tinker with --- I might wanna tweak a properly
running system but not trouble-shoot its setup" and so I just restore
Fedora+Gnome3 and think, "ah well, maybe in another year from now".

We're talking bog-standard laptops here: an XPS, 2 older ThinkPads, a very
budget Asus.

I'm quite grateful someone pointed me to Fedora when I got over my 3D gfx
fascination phase and was _more_ than ready to ditch Windows again "stat".
Really stands on its own. (Granted, Ubuntu also seems to work well for many
but I don't see _any_ benefit over F now that I know about it =)

~~~
ddavis
I've used Arch Linux (with Gnome 3, i3, dwm, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate) for 6 years
now and it has (or any of the DE's/WM's have) _never_ bugged out on me (many
different laptops and desktops as well). I've only once had a destroyed
installation and it was completely my fault. I would actually recommend Arch
Linux as a great distribution for getting real work done. I know academic
research groups that use it as OS for the boxes in their labs and they've
never had problems with stability or things working out the box. Fedora is a
great OS, but I just don't really see it having a big leg up on everybody
else.

~~~
baldfat
I no longer use Arch Linux due to breakage. In the six years you didn't have a
problem when they switched to systemd and bugged all the config files to null?
There have been several times when I pacman -Syu and didn't read the front
page and there goes 15 minute to 3 hours.

I had several HUGE reports due and I ended up having to go on a different
machine and git pull to get them done it time. I never recommend Arch Linux
for anything beside personal hobby work.

~~~
mynewtb
You could set up a nice backup and restore system in less than 3 hours to make
sure that software upgrade issues never affect your professional work work. I
have that for my personal hobby work even though 6 years Arch have made me
appreciate the most stable and predictable system I ever used.

~~~
baldfat
Ugh I remember using btrfs for this. It was never worth the effort and I would
have a bunch of little paper cuts or a full drive very quickly.

------
DCKing
I've switched to Fedora with version 26 (from Ubuntu and some dabbling with
Manjaro) and really enjoy it. SELinux gave me a few headscratchers in the
beginning but once you know how to deal with it it's great to have a distro
that is both a great user experience and has some nice hardening/dont-shoot-
yourself-in-the-foot features.

The best thing for me about this release is better support for shared folders
in Gnome Boxes (Ubuntu 17.10 and other distros with Gnome 3.26 have this too).
This was the only thing holding Boxes back from firmly beating VirtualBox for
desktop virtualization. Boxes is already a better user experience and uses
superior libvirt/KVM tech for virtualization, but the shared folders UX was
not up to par with VirtualBox before now.

~~~
jimmies
I don't understand SELinux and I have not found a document that explains for
the average Joe like me what it is for and why doesn't my qemu-libvirt work
when it is enabled, which is the default. It took me two nights to figure out
that SELinux prevents qemu-libvirt to read certain ROM files that I need.

So after scratching my head, I just turned it off altogether. Other than that,
Fedora has been really rock solid, great distribution for me at home. I'm
still using Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop at work, though. Ubuntu has been
really good as well.

~~~
DCKing
I am mostly on board with this, actually. The experience with machinectl and
systemd-nspawn is also completely broken because there are no sane default
SELinux rules for it.

However in my experience so far, the defaults do not get in your way during
regular usage. You typically only encounter such issues when you're also in
the position to fix them. And I think in general it's a great idea to have
default deny policies for containers and VMs.

> So after scratching my head, I just turned it off altogether.

Please don't do this. It's not worth disabling an entire security system if
you can just spend some time to figure out a command to make the system work
for you. Fedora even has gui tools that notify you when you encounter an
SELinux issue. See stopdisablingselinux.com.

------
jacek
I highly recommend Fedora 27. I have been using beta for the last few weeks. I
switched from Arch and I am very happy with how well everything works and how
stable it is.

Fedora team has a release schedule for every release. However, they don't
release until they are sure everything works as expected (27 was delayed by a
few weeks). That really makes the stable release rock solid. I wish other
popular distros would do the same.

~~~
farresito
What did you dislike about Arch? I made the opposite move years ago: I went
from Fedora to Arch, and it was possibly the best choice I could have made.

~~~
stinkytaco
Not OP, but I value stability over having the latest version. Fedora is fairly
bleeding edge compared to other fixed release distributions, but also tested.

Fedora is also easier to install. The older I get, the less hassle I want.

~~~
dmix
I had a similar view towards Linux at first, preferring Fedora to ArchLinux
for stability. But after switching back to Arch and sticking with it I've
learned stability is a matter of software choice and experience with Linux,
it's not necessarily more or less stable at the OS/package manager level.

Using AUR/user-style packages or non-mainline packages (beta, unstable) is
always a risk in whatever distro you use and stable packages in Arch are as
stable as elsewhere... depending on the type of software you choose.

The power of ArchLinux makes the learning curve worth it IMO. Plus the
minimalism of the base system is a good way to become intimately familiar with
Linux.

The other major factor is what laptop you are using. Since switching to a
Thinkpad (or Dell XPS) which has good hardware support in Linux I've had zero
problems at the graphics/network/external monitor level which is typical
source of issues with new distro releases.

~~~
fhood
I _cannot_ disagree more. 90% of the most obnoxious issues I deal with on
linux are related to nasty driver incompatibilities, and you will not convince
me that I should have had more experience with linux. I want my drivers to
work on install. I shouldn't need a second computer and a usb drive to get my
system working.

~~~
dmix
... which is why I noted the importance of using well-supported hardware, ie
Thinkpad or Dell XPS which are both very well documented in the ArchLinux wiki
and well supported by the community with drivers. This solved a big chunk of
the issues I was experiencing.

I've found the people who attack Linux for lack of graphics/network driver
support are people who haven't used it in recent years. This was a far bigger
problem in the past than it is today. But if you're planning to use Linux for
your desktop, with the latest software, not 2yr old distros, it's essential to
purchase a laptop with Linux in mind. Much like how MacOS is limited to
particular hardware, it's good to view Linux for desktop similarly.

~~~
fhood
Fair enough, I mostly meant that certain distros are more likely to support
your hardware out of the box.

------
mrmondo
Congrats to all involved, I’m especially proud that the choice was made to
delay the release in favour of quality. To me that says so much about the
motives and dedication of the people working on the project(s). Compare this
say to Debian when they released Jessie - it wasn’t at all ready for release,
missing packages, a broken SELinux ecosystem and some of these they classed as
release critical - apparently not when it came down to it.

Anyway, fantastic work all - a fantastic distro that I believe in many ways
sets an example for others (especially security wise). I look forward to all
the hard work making its way into RHEL & CentOS in time to come.

------
pyrophane
The biggest change I'm waiting for is fractional scaling support for Gnome
under Weyland. This is achievable under X using some combination of integer
scaling and xrandr, and Ubuntu 17.04 had support for it out of the box via the
gui (not sure of the underlying implementation).

Fortunately this change is expected in Gnome 3.28, which is only a few months
away. Having that will mean a lot to those of us using HiDPI displays that
aren't quite pixel dense enough for 200% scaling.

~~~
dguaraglia
This is exactly what I'm waiting for. The moment it's stable in a reasonable
distro, I'm trying it on one of the fancy 8th gen Intel laptops with it and if
everything works as expected, I'll get my first non-Mac computer in over half
a decade.

------
fpoling
Gnome Shell is supposed to show case Wayland. Yet apparently it got
fundamental architecture wrong to the point of Fedora documentation issuing an
apology. From Common Fedora bugs page [1]:

> Otherwise, we advise that you may wish to consider using the GNOME on Xorg
> session (see above) rather than the default Wayland session; this should at
> least prevent the crashes from ending your GNOME session when they occur. We
> do apologize for any inconvenience and/or lost data caused by such Shell
> crashes.

In Fedora 26 I experienced those crashes few times out of the blue. It is
annoying to say the least.

[1] -
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F27_bugs#Wayland_issue...](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F27_bugs#Wayland_issues)

~~~
nbaksalyar

       > I experienced those crashes few times out of the blue
    

It largely depends on your graphics driver. Wayland support is almost absent
for NVidia but it works very well on Intel and AMD GPUs.

~~~
an_d_rew
... which happens to be the exact opposite of what you want if you’re into
deep learning.

Sigh.

~~~
fpoling
Can one productively use a video card in a laptop or even in a high-end
desktop for machine learning? At work we use a special workstation-type box
with 4 NVidea cards. It is not connected to any display and we do not run any
remote graphical sections on it that could have used graphical cards. Still it
is slow at learning. If not the size of datasets (video in lossless
compression), we would use cloud solutions.

~~~
m45t3r
Yeah, you can actually do it. Just run desktop in your integrated Intel GPU
and CUDA in NVIDIA discrete GPU.

------
walkingolof
Here are the instructions how to upgrade using dnf if you have Fedora 21 or
newer:
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade)

Looking forward to the new display settings in Gnome 3.26
[https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-
notes/3.26/](https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.26/)

~~~
jacek
The big change will come with Gnome 3.28 - real fractional scaling. You can
test early version of it on 3.26 [1] (experimental).

[1] [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-
scaling...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scaling-
gnome-linux)

~~~
lima
That's very cool.

For users of older Gnome versions, note that you can change both the font
scaling (text-scaling-factor) and global UI scaling factors.

If you, like me, have a screen that needs 1.5 scale, you can either set UI
scale to 1 and font scale to 1.5, or UI scale to 2 and font scale to 0.5.

That's almost as good as real fractional UI scaling.

~~~
jacek
I have the same problem - 14 inch WQHD screen. I use 1x UI scaling, 1.6x font
scaling. I also made a custom css for GTK that resizes window
decorations/buttons that make them more usable. The solution is not perfect
though. I am having some problems with Qt apps.

Fractional scaling on 3.28 will allow you to have different scaling for each
display. Will also be more consistent across different apps (Gtk, Qt,
electron, etc.).

~~~
lima
Qt works fine for me. Have you set your Xft DPI?

    
    
      $ cat .Xresources
    
      Xft.dpi:	144
      Xft.hinting:	1
      Xft.hintstyle:	hintslight
      Xft.antialias:	1
      Xft.rgba:	none
      Xcursor.size:	48
      Xcursor.theme:	Adwaita

~~~
jacek
Thanks lima. .Xresources does not work on Wayland. In my case Qt apps work ok
until I connect an external display. Here's before/after:
[https://imgur.com/a/bJb0J](https://imgur.com/a/bJb0J)

~~~
lima
Ow. Can't help with Wayland :(

It does work with X11 for me.

------
ben_jones
Is there a curated up-to-date list of reasons _somewhere_ on the internet that
explains to a naive end-user why he/she should pick a given distro?

~~~
jononor
Pick whatever the most competent and helpful Linux-user around you uses... The
distos are pretty much all the same, just different in the details.

~~~
smichel17
This is really good advice. I'm a Fedora user who has set up several "non-
technical" users (quoted because I have qualms about that term) with
gnu/linux. At first I was giving them Ubuntu since it's the most common and
supposedly "regular person friendly". After multiple experiences struggling to
provide advice or support, ended up switching them to what I use. It's just
easier when I already know the ins and outs of the system.

------
keithpeter

         [keith@localhost ~]$ locate mp3 | grep lib
         /usr/lib64/libmp3lame.so.0
         /usr/lib64/libmp3lame.so.0.0.0
    

Fresh install of just Fedora 27 on my test Thinkpad (old X200). Rhythmbox
plays mp3s and Audacity exports to mp3. Nice to see.

------
throw2016
Most major Linux distros have become quite similar and the differences are
mostly superficial.

It shocking to see the huge number of reports here complaining of breakages
compelling preference to Fedora since most provide a near similar out of the
box experience for both desktops and servers.

------
s_kilk
Not the most exciting release, but boy am I glad Fedora exists. I switched
over from Ubuntu around this time last year and it's been so much better, more
stable, better packaging, more up-to-date packages by default. A really great
OS. And on my Thinkpad it runs flawlessly.

~~~
hd4
I also left Ubuntu recently, so I'm a bit of a Fedora noob but the KDE spin
has been amazing, not sure if that's got more to do with KDE or Fedora though.

The partition manager has an annoying bug hen opening in 26 so I'm hoping that
got fixed. And I think the new Firefox will come packaged or at least part of
a normal update, so good times.

HP Pavilion and it works completely fine.

~~~
Lordarminius
I had the opposite experience. Could not install Fedora 26 on a HP machine
alongside Windows 10. I was ready to pull my hair out... Ubuntu installed
fine. Never did find out what the issue was.

------
meesterdude
Great to see!

After spending a week trying to get various OS's to play nice on my PC,
everything "just worked" in fedora. And worked well - apple polish level
experience. Now, i use it over debian as my main dev VM.

It's a great OS for getting out of the way and letting you get stuff done.

------
loop0
Fedora has been by far the most perfect out-of-the-box experience for my
thinkpad machines: t460s and e430. It is stable, lightweight and it doesn't
get in the way. I mainly use for python and go development, docker and
browsing.

------
Tomte
What's the HiDPI situation (with KDE or Gnome) today?

Last I checked, I could drive an HiDPI display without problems, but not the
LoDPI display by its side, because you couldn't do independent scaling of the
displays.

Has that changed, yet?

~~~
adambyrtek
This is supported by GNOME Shell 3.26 which I'm currently running under Ubuntu
17.10.

------
vesak
Gnome-shell keeps crashing due to a libgobject segfault. About 4 times a day.
No idea where the fault is, and even more amusingly, my other laptop works
fine on the same settings.

Price of complex software, I suppose.

~~~
ronjouch
May be
[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788931](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788931)
(half a dozen crashes a day here too). Regarding _" No idea where the fault
is"_, check journalctl, the crash should be logged here.

~~~
vesak
I'll be also trying this on xorg, see if that helps any.

------
brightball
I’m running into issues with the upgrade from 26. “Offline” kept giving me an
error about distro-sync being and invalid argument. Online mostly worked but I
stepped away and came back to the terminal window just being gone. Now I’m at
this stuck spot where the fedora-upgrade says “Can’t upgrade from version
2627” which I assume is some in between state?

Didn’t have any issues with the 25-26 upgrade fwiw.

------
sandGorgon
For those of you with older macbooks, here's how you can try fedora.

[https://www.linux.org/threads/installing-fedora-26-beta-
on-a...](https://www.linux.org/threads/installing-fedora-26-beta-on-a-macbook-
air.12464/)

------
gtycomb
How is memory consumption on Fedora 27? I am using Fedora 24. When I check
with 'free' after it boots, slightly more than half a GB is used on my laptop.
In any case, thanks to the team for a very fine open source OS from RedHat.

~~~
foxhop
Try `free -m`

Linux tries to use as much memory as possible for buffers/cache. When a
program requires more memory the cache is freed up automatically to be used.

Right now my laptop is using 2G and has 1242 "free" but as you can see the
buffer's cache count toward available memory.

    
    
                      total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
        Mem:           7678        2089        1242         307        4346        4963
        Swap:          3711           0        3711

------
raintrees
Is Adobe's Flash product supported? I use a Flash-based tool for Remote
Desktop (400+ systems under management) and difficulties getting Flash to work
caused me to give up on Fedora 26. Mint has Flash support from the start...

~~~
jhasse
It's pretty good supported with Firefox. The flash package is part of
rpmfusion-nonfree:
[https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration](https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration)

I'm using it to play videos on some sites that still use Flash.

------
otto_ortega
If you are planning to try Fedora, here is my recommendation to get an
astonishingly great set up in no time:

\- Do a fresh install

\- Use Fedy [0] install with a single click pretty much any development IDE
you may need plus other must-have tools (Skype, Dropbox, VirtualBox,
TeamViewer, etc...)

\- Install the "dash to panel" Gnome extension [1]

\- Use Fedy to install Numix or Arch as themes and "pimp" your GUI ;)

\- Enjoy!!

Here is how my desktop looks with the described set up:
[https://snag.gy/F6SM4L.jpg](https://snag.gy/F6SM4L.jpg)

[0] [https://www.folkswithhats.org/](https://www.folkswithhats.org/)

[1] [https://github.com/jderose9/dash-to-
panel](https://github.com/jderose9/dash-to-panel)

~~~
bckygldstn
Fedy looks interesting, but I couldn't figure out how it works.

Is it like another package manager, or can I use dnf to manage/update the
packages it installs?

~~~
lima
Worse, it's just a collection of shell scripts:

[https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/an...](https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/androidstudio.plugin/install.sh)

It does no signature validation whatsoever or dependency tracking.

Don't use it if you care about security or a clean system.

~~~
otto_ortega
How is a collection of scripts for which you can easily read and edit the
source code "worse" than installing a rpm package or a compiled program?

The thing about signature validation can be easily resolved with a simple text
replace. About dependency tracking: as I said, it is not a package manager and
it uses dnf under the hood, which already does that.

Unless you only install open source software AFTER doing a full source code
audit. You are blatantly overreacting just to look as "security conscious".

For disclosure: I don't have anything to do with the project other than the
fact that I have been using it for years without any issue.

~~~
subway
I know plenty of folks who've ridden motorcycles helmetless for years without
any issue.

It's a collection of script written in a non-idempotent manner, and run in an
uncontrolled, undefined environment. The benefit of binary packages is that
you have a reasonable idea that the package will consistently build in a well
defined environment (the base build chroot for the OS + the defined
dependencies in the package). The result is a consistent reproducible binary
that means when you run version x.y.z it's the same as version x.y.z that I'm
running, and the same as version x.y.z that the package maintainer is running.

When software is "packaged" via install scripts that fetch and build from the
internet on the fly with loosely defined versions, you stand a lot of risk of
breaking your environment. If you only spend time in toy environments playing
games and looking at cat pictures, that's fine.

If you rely on the tools you work with to be stable, perform in a consistent
manner, and not accidentally leak information about your environment (you'd be
shocked by how many test suites will post your local environment variables out
to arbitrary metrics collection points), then pre-build binary packages are a
safe and reliable way to operate.

You can have fun letting the wind blow through your hair; I'll keep my helmet
on, thanks.

~~~
otto_ortega
You are changing your argument... You were originally talking about security
and whatever you define as a "clean system" not about stability and robustness
and on that regard my point remains valid:

Binary packages are not intrinsically more secure that plain text scripts that
you can easily audit.

If you feel safer because you are executing by hand a bunch of commands that
can be automated with a script that's ok.

In my case I rather spend that time doing something more productive.

~~~
subway
Build integrity is inherently a security issue.

------
akulbe
It seems kinda odd to me, that it's released as an update today.

I download the image, install it in a VM, and there are ~289 package updates
on a fresh install.

------
ufo
Is Firefox 57 already out in Fedora 27, by any chance?

~~~
jacek
Yes, it is.

EDIT: And CSD works! Instructions to enable it are in a video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz_mPVwhDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz_mPVwhDg)
(I recommend to mute sounds).

~~~
hd4
I'm guessing this doesn't apply to those who are on KDE?

~~~
jacek
KDE handles Gtk3 CSD well. I think that might work. I haven't tried it on KDE
though.

------
bmurphy1976
How's the HIDPI support in Fedora these days? That's the #1 deal breaker for
me and every single Linux distro.

~~~
moosingin3space
On Gnome with Wayland, it works, but only with integer multiples. Gnome 3.28
(which will ship in F28) will have full fractional scaling support if you need
that.

------
jcastro
Does anyone know if the Atomic Host will auto update from 26->27 or is it a
manual process?

~~~
rageear
It will not.

The location of the F27 bits are separate from the F26 bits, so you'll have to
manually add a new remote and then rebase to that new remote.

    
    
      $ sudo ostree remote add --set=gpgkeypath=/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-27-primary fedora-atomic-27 https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/atomic/27
      $ sudo rpm-ostree rebase fedora-atomic-27:fedora/27/x86_64/atomic-host
    

Static deltas are enabled from the last F26 commit to the F27 release which
should reduce the amount of data you have to ship over. Just make sure your
host is at the latest F26 release via `rpm-ostree upgrade` before doing the
rebase operation.

~~~
rageear
And here's a handy upgrade guide:
[http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-
atomic-26-to...](http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-
atomic-26-to-27-upgrade/)

------
porfirium
Wayland out of the box?

~~~
cverna
Wayland is the default display server since Fedora 25.

~~~
alphadevx
Yeah but frankly its been kinda beta, not quite "it just works" so far.

~~~
chisleu
Especially for those of us with Optimus systems (shared frame buffer between
intel and Nvidia graphics systems.)

Additionally, some laptops have external displays wired to Nvidia, making it
impossible to use intel-only graphics with external displays.

