
Fedora 26 released - gtirloni
https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-26-is-here/
======
danieldk
I am mainly a macOS user, but I keep around a Dell workstation for work that
needs a lot of memory or cores. After years of primarily running Debian and
Ubuntu, I switched the machine to Fedora 25 and upgraded to Fedora 26 during
the beta cycle.

I was surprised how good Fedora is these days. The GNOME desktop is buttery
smooth with Wayland and the Nouveau drivers on the relatively old Quadro that
the machine has. Audio and suspend/resume worked out-of-the-box without any
problems. Upgrades are very fast thanks to DNF and delta RPMs. Software also
seems to get minor release updates within a release (e.g., I had some vim
updates).

The Fedora installer also put / on a separate btrfs subvolume as it should
(Ubuntu didn't do that in 16.04, not sure if they fixed that).

Great work Fedora folks!

~~~
chronid
Did they fix the copy-paste issues between application with wayland in Fedora
26 (particular between terminal and the rest of the world)? But maybe that is
a more of request for the GNOME guys...

~~~
jhasse
Just tested copy and pasting on a fresh Fedora 26 install between gnome-
terminal, gedit and Firefox: All directions worked fine :)

~~~
chronid
Nice. I had to move back to Xorg just because of that in 25. Time for an
upgrade I guess :)

------
sitepodmatt
I've been a Ubuntu user for years, but I've just read the Fedora 26
announcement and followed the link through to Gnome 3.24 release notes
([https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-
notes/3.24/](https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.24/)). The 3rd
headlighting major feature of this is "New Recipes Application". One word:
Sold! I've been dreaming of the day Linux DE/WM got this core feature!

I think we can safely say 2017 will indeed be the year of Linux desktop, we
got there, we've made it! (there is also minor footnotes for niche things like
file managers, calendar and gfx config, if that's your thing)

~~~
nul_byte
There was me thinking it was some app configuration installation tool

------
lima
Fedora has been great lately. QA is so much better than other distros. Things
"just work".

~~~
meddlepal
Agreed. I readopted Fedora as my distro of choice around 19 and haven't looked
back.

~~~
astrodust
I've been using Fedora since they forked from RedHat for the simple reason
that clicking "Next" through the installer or mashing F12 always did the right
thing by default.

Ubuntu and Debian, by comparison, would always ask stupid questions that had
even dumber defaults. Nothing would ever work unless you went out of your way
to look things up.

The Fedora team has done a really great job of keeping the distribution
coherent and functional even though they've fully embraced the "move fast and
break things" mentality.

The only down-side to Fedora is they iterate really quickly and there's no LTS
option, as that's what RedHat is for, but if you can turn over your
installations on a regular basis (e.g. cloud servers) it's not really a big
deal.

~~~
fulafel
They didn't fork, RH just rebranded it.

~~~
astrodust
Fedora is not identical to RedHat. It's more of a proving ground for new
things that may or may not make their way back into RedHat Enterprise Linux.

It's not a simple rebrand. Fedora Core 1 took what was staged for RedHat 10
and packaged it with a different license and sent it off in a different
direction.

------
mastax
I was a bit cynical when GNOME started writing new 'modern' desktop apps. It
seemed like a lot of wasted effort chasing Windows/Mac. Who really needs a
native desktop maps app?

But I actually really like the new apps they've put together. They're simple,
clean, and lightweight. I'm a bit surprised that they're made with GTK.

Still hate "hot corners," though.

~~~
0xFFC
I do agree about hot corners m.

Have used it for long time? It is really buggy. After awhile it literally
slows down. I keep my workstation open for at 2 days and after 7,8 hours it
gets slower and slower m.

And sometimes it crashes badly. That should not happen with desktop
environment.

~~~
Kostic
Do you use extensions? I've experienced this (in Fedora 21 to 23) but since I
stopped using extensions, I haven't had a single crash. I usually run one
session on the laptop for 5 days straight.

~~~
0xFFC
I am not going to use gnome with out extensions . Never ever ;)

------
mickael-kerjean
I saw some articles saying fedora 26 might land with fractional scaling for
Hdpi screen. Any news regarding this? if it lands somewhere is there any way
to know about it? I'll be very keen to switch back to Linux when my main
laptop will have good support for this

~~~
pinpeliponni
Gnome 3 has been dpi independent from day 0, so what are you talking about?

~~~
dgllghr
DPI independent, but requires whole number scaling (1x, 2x, not 1.5x)

~~~
voltagex_
And WINE still won't scale.

I'll buy a Chuwi HiDPI laptop for any developer who can make HiDPI on Linux
suck less.

------
RandomKid
Everyone is praising GNOME here. Am I the only one who thinks that it's not
polished enough? I'm using it on my laptop and it kind of works most of the
time. But there are occasional bugs arising here and there. I even sometimes
think that I'm the first user otherwise how come nobody noticed those
(sometimes very obvious) bugs. If 26 isn't fixing them, apparently I'll have
to move back to the Cinnamon spin.

~~~
rhblake
I think GNOME 3 has come a long way but years later I'm _still_ bothered by
their killing type-ahead navigation in the file dialog and replacing it with
search -- however useful searching may be (and despite recent improvements),
it slows me down greatly, and often leads to mistakes, when I know where
something is and simply want to _navigate_ to it.

Plenty of discussion about this [0] [1] but the GNOME devs don't want it back,
for various reasions.

Ubuntu has always patched it back in, but it looks like they will drop it in
17.10 if nobody steps up to maintain the patch [2].

[0]
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164016)

[1]
[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721968](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721968)

[2]
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666681)

------
43224gg252
I switched away from Ubuntu and to Fedora quite a few cycles ago because at
the time they supported systemd by default and I wanted specifically to use
systemd-nspawn. I found that it was a very solid and stable GNOME 3
distribution and that it had the best implementation of GNOME 3 between it and
Ubuntu GNOME.

Now that Ubuntu is going to switch to GNOME I might eventually switch back but
idk yet.

The one gripe I have with fedora is that dnf is much slower than apt.

~~~
MaxLeiter
There's (supposedly) a C version being created, but it's a pain to keep up to
date with its progress.

[http://dnf.baseurl.org/2016/02/24/dnf-into-c-initiative-
star...](http://dnf.baseurl.org/2016/02/24/dnf-into-c-initiative-started/)

------
sandGorgon
The best part of fedora 26 is built in f.lux /redshift. No need to install or
setup third party apps. Just that feature makes it worth it

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Man its annoying that this kind of stuff is specific to the DE not OS.

I find XFCE to be perfect for my workflow but would love this utility.

~~~
infodroid
Doesn't Redshift work for you? It's not GNOME specific.

[https://fedoramagazine.org/safe-eyes-
redshift/](https://fedoramagazine.org/safe-eyes-redshift/)

------
rayiner
So what's the Linux remote desktop story these days? It seems like modern
versions of GNOME running on Wayland don't support VNC?

~~~
patrick_vbn
There is an RDP backend for Wayland:
[https://241931348f64b1d1.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/waylands-r...](https://241931348f64b1d1.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/waylands-
rdp-backend/)

There is a SPICE backend: [https://github.com/ein-shved/compositor-
spice](https://github.com/ein-shved/compositor-spice)

There is the Samsung effort Wayland Over Wire (WOW):
[https://blogs.s-osg.org/wow-wayland-over-wire/](https://blogs.s-osg.org/wow-
wayland-over-wire/)

Apparantly, the Pipewire effort to make a high performance, low latency
audio/video server will address remote display somehow too:
[https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-
workstation...](https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-
workstation-26-and-beyond/#comment-6906)

------
flannelhead
Congratulations Fedora!

Everyone is praising the GNOME (default) edition. Does anyone use the KDE
spin? Also, how are Fedora version upgrades nowadays? I'm trying to decide
between KDE neon and Fedora.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
I've used the KDE spin since GNOME 3 came out, and I love it. I wouldn't dream
of going back.

~~~
reitanqild
I guess this means it now gets enough attention? Last I tried (n years ago) it
felt like a second class citizen.

------
zeep
I love Fedora 25, but according to this thread[1], Firefox doesn't work out of
the box in Fedora 26? Seems like a big oversight...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6mjb7j/fedora_26_tor...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6mjb7j/fedora_26_torrents_released/dk284lr/)

~~~
brendaningram
I haven't had a single issue with Firefox (54) out of the box. I know that
some add-ons can break the multi-process windows feature, but out of the box
has been fine, both with clean VirtualBox installs and bare-metal desktop
installs.

------
atemerev
Still no Wayland with Nvidia drivers. Yes, I have read perhaps too much about
GBM/EGLStream debate, but right now I am out of luck with my GTX1080 :(

(And, frankly, Wayland guys are wrong and Nvidia is right.)

~~~
pzone
To the parenthetical part of your post: I thought Wayland and NVidia sorted
out their differences several months ago and agreed to write a new protocol
that addressed the valid concerns of both parties.

------
nickserv
Been hearing a lot of positive feedback from Fedora lately. Wondering how good
the KDE integration is before trying it out though ( no machine to spare).
Anybody have some experience with KDE and Fedora, in particular!at Wayland and
multi monitor support?

------
xorcist
Ever since Ubuntu went all NIH with Mir and Unity, I looked for other desktops
to recommend to people who want something that "just works". The wishlist
includes non-breaking upgrades and not changing interface unnecessarily.

There are a few modern distributions like Mint and Elementary, but none pay
much attention to upgrades. Fedora Workstation it is. The tools have matured a
bit since esr's wife famously wanted to use her printer with it.

The past four or five years with it have been pretty uneventful, just as was
hoped.

~~~
sjellis
Solus is very, very good. The default version uses their own desktop, but they
also offer a solid GNOME edition and are preparing a KDE edition as well.

I am a long-time Fedora user, and very fussy about Linux desktops, but would
now recommend Solus over Fedora for most people: it is almost as polished,
more simple to manage, faster on modern hardware, and has newer software
packages whilst staying away from the bleeding edge technologies that Fedora
promotes. For example, the move to Wayland is great, but if you just want a
system that works, you don't want a distribution that enables it by default
just yet.

------
noahdesu
I've been running Fedora 24/25 on my Macbook Air for the better part of the
past year. It has been fantastic, and I don't see myself going back to OSX
anytime soon. I intend to upgrade to F26.

------
brendaningram
I've been using Debian Stretch (which was previously Debian Testing) for the
last 2 years. I didn't ever have a single problem. But as the months passed I
kept getting miffed about old packages. Yes, there are backports etc, but it
just didn't feel current enough. I loved the stability though.

When the difference in Firefox versions got to 50 vs 54, and I had written
myself a custom bash script to keep Firefox updated, I went looking...

I've been running F26 since the early alpha days, and I have to say that I
haven't had a single problem in that whole time. I've been running it on my
brand new i7 desktop machine as well as a 7 year old HP laptop. Both have been
superb. Performance of Gnome 3.24 is great. Stability of the platform as a
whole is rock solid.

In fact, the only issue I have come across is with MakeMKV (which I have
written about elsewhere). Other than that, all of my use cases have been rock
solid. For reference, they include:

* Firefox (with Lastpass, uBlock origin, HTTPS everywhere, privacy badger add-ons)

* Evolution (for email, contacts, and calendar)

* taskwarrior

* ledger (with some hledger experimentation)

* Gnucash

* MakeMKV (for creating MKV files for my LibreElec HTPC)

* Shotwell (for my 15,000 file photo library)

* Quodlibet (for my 140GB music library - including a growing FLAC library)

* vim (for all my writing)

* git (for my writing and my code)

* Krita (with a Wacom tablet for illustrations for some book ideas I have)

* gimp (for image editing. e.g. I mocked up a photo of my house with how it might look with a grape vine covered pergola)

* Libreoffice (including my wife using it for her study, opening and editing MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files from the Uni)

* Ardour & Calf Plugins for music recording. I also experimented with BitWig, which was fantastic, but I prefer to support OSS.

* Golang (1.8, for my own personal development projects)

* Postgres (for same)

* qemu and virt-manager (for virtual machines)

I was a Microsoft .NET developer for almost 20 years. I've been a Linux user
in my own time for a bit over 5 years. I'm now happy to say that I use Linux
100% for every single computer related task I have, and I couldn't be happier.

So far, the move to F26 has been fantastic, and it gets my highest
recommendation to anyone else that might be considering it.

P.S. I also happily use F26 for the occasional 0AD game :)

------
Yuioup
Does Wayland work with proprietary nVidia drivers yet?

~~~
patrick_vbn
See [https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-
workstation...](https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-
workstation-26-and-beyond/)

------
FullyFunctional
Fedora is a fine Linux distro (as are many others).

I was hoping to see an update on the RISC-V port. Fabrice has made it easy to
try to the early F25 in the browser (see,
[https://vfsync.org/vm_list.html](https://vfsync.org/vm_list.html)) and I'd
really love to see RISC-V becoming an officially supported architecture now
that the privileged spec is frozen (that is, will evolve in a backwards
compatible way).

