5 ms·

This is the first distro with Gnome 3.18,Wayland and systemd ... And the new sat solver based package manager. And it works really very well. There are liveusb

This is the first distro with Gnome 3.18,Wayland and systemd ... And the new sat solver based package manager. And it works really very well. There are liveusb (for macbooks as well) - really encourage everyone to give it a spin without installing. This is really the future of the Linux desktop.

vox_mollis 11y ago
Fedora has had systemd for quite some time now.
- lockyc 11y ago
  That's an 'and' not an 'or'
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  True, this comment was meant for a lot of people (like me), who are asking why Fedora? Most people only know of Ubuntu and probably hate systemd . This is a cool showcase for all of them
tadfisher 11y ago
I have been on Arch with the first three of those features for a couple of weeks now :)
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  genuine question - how's the install experience these days ? I havent tried Arch in years, and the recent Twitch.tv's Arch centric "world's most frustrating distro install" hasnt helped much. is there something cool that you get from Arch ? I mean, I pretty much installed Fedora over Ubuntu because I wanted bleeding edge Gnome and Wayland to play with.
  - tadfisher 11y ago
    > how's the install experience these days ? The install experience is still entirely manual. However, the hardest part is deciding on the more contentious components, such as the choice of filesystem(s), partition scheme, and bootloader. The actual install process is simply following the install guide, typing commands, and occasionally delving into the wiki to learn how to configure the more esoteric components, should you choose to use them. Granted, this is far above what most normal people can or want to do, and that's fine. Other distros exist, with real installers, and they make mostly-sane choices for you. > is there something cool that you get from Arch ? - A system completely customized to your software tastes. You can do this with Fedora and Ubuntu after the fact, but you're not building those systems from the ground up. - Unadulterated software. Arch keeps downstream patching to an absolute minimum. I'm running Gnome, not Gnome patched hundreds of times over to work with hundreds of external dependencies. - A huge and well-maintained repository of unofficial software packages. Again, you get this with the popular distros, but Arch has a very decent canonical experience compared to them. I personally did not like dealing with PPAs to get user-packaged software on Ubuntu, for example. - Current software. I run mainline kernels and the latest open-source graphics drivers with what I consider to be a reasonable testing buffer. What I consider reasonable is most likely not what others consider reasonable.
  - solnyshok 11y ago
    you can get Arch with GUI installer via Antergos distribution
  - farresito 11y ago
    Arch is not too difficult to install. Granted, if you don't have much free time, then better to spend it doing something else. The first time I installed Arch was five years ago. I had no idea about the Linux shell or command line, yet the manuals were quite good that I managed go do it with no problem. I personally love Pacman. For some reason, Ubuntu always ends up creating conflicts that I can't manually resolve (when installing things outside of the official repositories). I never get those issues with AUR. If you have time, give it a try; otherwise, don't lose sleep over it. You always have Manjaro (albeit I think it uses different repositories) or Antergos (not sure about this, either. I remember reading about a distro that used the official Arch repos, but can't remember the name).
  - draven 11y ago
    "how's the install experience these days ?" I have no idea, I installed my current Arch 3 or 4 years ago and kept it updated since then. I do not remember it being difficult at the time. "is there something cool that you get from Arch ?" Everything is up to date, I love the package manager and the AUR (the user contributed "packages" in the form of instructions to build a package) w/ devel packages (ie you can easily install git versions of some software.) I use yaourt as a front-end. I use it to manage configuration files (and manually merge upstream config files with my locally modified files.) The distro feels lightweight (I'm not using any DE, only Xmonad, so that may help), and there's not too much "magic", in the sense that you can easily find everything in config files. It kinda feels like a BSD system in that regard. I'm learning Haskell and lots of up to date packages are available in Arch, I would not be surprised if Arch is one of the most popular distros among Haskell devs. The Arch wiki has every bit of information you need for the initial setup, then reading Arch's website main page before a "big" update should be enough (they post instructions for important migrations there, when the upgrade could require some manual intervention.)
  - xiaq 11y ago
    > how's the install experience these days? It really depends on how you define "experience". For me, I like the manual installation procedure like everything else on Arch. Sure, it is not "easy". But the point is that you are taught to do things with standard Linux tools, save the package manager and a few straightforward shell scripts. Arch doesn't give you all sorts of fancy, "automated", distro-specific tools to make your life easier, because easy life is a temporary illusion in the fast-changing -- and by consequence, always broken -- world that is Linux desktop. Automated tools that made you life easier yesterday will likely make your life harder tomorrow, due to all the changes in upstream software these tools try to hide. Keeping such tools up to date will require continued interest in the development, something Linux desktop community never really succeeded to deliver. Arch just puts you in the real, wild landscape of Linux desktop. It may not be comfortable at first, but that's how Linux desktop is.
  - rhinoceraptor 11y ago
    If you've got Intel graphics, wireless, etc. the process is pretty straightforward. You can even install over wifi from the install media. The software availability is the biggest reason I use it, pretty much everything that could be installed is available through the main repos or AUR.
  - l1ambda 11y ago
    I went back to Fedora from Arch on desktop because Arch is tough to install. I have servers/workstations running Arch, CentoS and actually notice a lot of times the Fedora packages are often updated faster than Arch packages now. Also CentOS/Fedora give you selinux whereas Arch does not have that. (I'm not trying to rag on Arch at all, just stating my recent experience.) My servers running Arch I plan to migrate to CentOS 7 for selinux and more enterprisey updates. Also I need to use ZFS with some servers in the future and I believe there is a fairly easy way to do that with CentOS. Actually it looks like this is easy to do with Arch, too. The arch wiki is amazing. Wayland is quite good in Fedora 23 now. The GNOME Maps app works now (it uses 3D) on my Radeon R9 290x. It didn't work in Fedora 22. I'm running Wayland now as my daily driver.
    - deviantways 11y ago
      Arch gives you a PAX/Grsecurity kernel which makes your system orders of magnitude less insecure than what CentOS gives you. You can use Grsecurity RSBAC features if you need access controls. In terms of security though, Fedora is getting better since it is defaulting to hardened packages but no hardened kernel.
  - nogbit 11y ago
    Give Manjaro a shot! It's Arch with a GUI installer. So if you don't have the time to do a full manual install it's so worth it and super fast. Give the XFCE iso a shot and you will be impressed. I ran Arch for years and recently had a build a new machine and went with Manjaro.
- ShaneOG 11y ago
  Is anyone running Arch on a 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 13"? I've seen conflicting reports of things working and not working, which is making me hesitant to try (I want to dual boot Max OS X)
  - dmix 11y ago
    Yep I have previously used Arch on a 2013 Retina. Worked fine. The Arch wiki has pages dedicated to Macbooks if you need help. The only issue I had with macbooks was the wifi card was not detected by the installer after booting from USB. It works fine after installing a package using pacman once you get internet. So I always keep a cheap $10 Netgear USB wifi for installs which always works by default. Most people who have issues with installing Arch are almost always just new to Arch or Linux. I had a lot of issues starting out with Arch but after the first 6 months learning curve I rarely had issues. I have been using it for over two years now on a daily basis, across multiple Macbook and Thinkpads models and custom desktop build. It has been very stable and though most software versions are often 1-2 yrs ahead of Debian/Fedora. I actually had way more problems while using Fedora for two years prior than I ever did with Arch. The Arch package library (AUR), wiki, and pacman provide a very strong foundation for using Linux as a desktop.
sspiff 11y ago
systemd has been the default init system for most distro's for quite a while now. Gnome is just one of the many desktop environments (and I wouldn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole). Wayland is nice though, and it's nice to see it reach the level of maturity to become the default display server on a popular distribution.
- vegabook 11y ago
  Two questions: a) does using Wayland in Fedora 23 offer the ability to scale the UI across different DPI monitors in a consistent way in Fedora 23? And b) am I going to get significant problems with Wayland on applications such as VirtualBox (running Windows inside it), terminal emulators Tmux, etc, and of course, browsers (Firefox?)? Ie is it usable without too much compromise?
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    not right now. I think multi-monitor support is broken right now. In fact, FYI - the version of X in F23 is bleeding edge and does not supporting binary nvidia drivers (yet)
keypusher 11y ago
The way this comment is phrased is a bit misleading. FC23 is not the first distro to have have access to each of those four things individually, and some of those things are not even new to this Fedora release. Systemd has been the default init system in Fedora for a couple years now, and DNF (new package manager) came in Fedora 22. For the actual changes go here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/23/ChangeSet https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/23/ChangeSet
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  I did not realize at the time I posted, but this is kicking up quite a bit of storm. but I really enjoyed using the shiny new Wayland in F23 (where it is reasonably stable to the point of using it as a daily driver). you are right, it is not the first release to have access to each... but IMHO the first release where everything works seamlessly. YMMV.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Fedora 22 also has a wayland preview mode.
devit 11y ago
It might be time to switch to a package management paradigm that doesn't require SAT solvers. For example, one in which packages do not conflict because they are installed in a directory for each package, and there is an "alternatives" mechanism for any global choice.
- tyho 11y ago
  What and have the dependencies for each package in the package directory node_modules style? No thanks, at least not unless it is on a file system that deals with duplicate subtrees within the filesystem.
  - devit 11y ago
    Just support installing multiple library versions "side-by-side".
    - e12e 11y ago
      I prefer to just have the zlib-version without known buffer overflows, thank you. That will generally mean fixes are backported to a frozen api that is known to work wit a subset of packages (say 10.000 or so). No changes (except less undocumented behaviour/crashes) on security patching. Feature changes are ok on release upgrades.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  Daniel J. Bernstein, around the turn of the century, proposed a /package hierarchy (for package management without the need for conflict resolution) and a /command directory. * http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html * http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html Their major problem was the idea that one had to register things with what was to most of the world just some bloke on another continent. But they had concepts like a hierarchical package naming scheme ("admin/", "mail/", &c.), self-contained build trees with versioned names, symbolic links to denote "currently selected version", and an "index"/"alternatives" directory full of symbolic links.
weavie 11y ago
How well does it work on macbbooks? I had a painful experience a while ago trying to install Arch on my mac. It kept freezing up, so I had to give up as I had a load of other things to do. I would really like to have another bash at getting Linux going on it.
bsg75 11y ago
> There are liveusb (for macbooks as well) Specific Mac images, or the main live USB image works on Macs?
bwindels 11y ago
was really looking forward to this as well, but couldn't get it to run on my mbp6,2

vox_mollis 11y ago

Fedora has had systemd for quite some time now.

lockyc 11y ago
That's an 'and' not an 'or'
sandGorgon 11y ago
True, this comment was meant for a lot of people (like me), who are asking why Fedora? Most people only know of Ubuntu and probably hate systemd . This is a cool showcase for all of them

tadfisher 11y ago

I have been on Arch with the first three of those features for a couple of weeks now :)

sandGorgon 11y ago
genuine question - how's the install experience these days ? I havent tried Arch in years, and the recent Twitch.tv's Arch centric "world's most frustrating distro install" hasnt helped much. is there something cool that you get from Arch ? I mean, I pretty much installed Fedora over Ubuntu because I wanted bleeding edge Gnome and Wayland to play with.
- tadfisher 11y ago
  > how's the install experience these days ? The install experience is still entirely manual. However, the hardest part is deciding on the more contentious components, such as the choice of filesystem(s), partition scheme, and bootloader. The actual install process is simply following the install guide, typing commands, and occasionally delving into the wiki to learn how to configure the more esoteric components, should you choose to use them. Granted, this is far above what most normal people can or want to do, and that's fine. Other distros exist, with real installers, and they make mostly-sane choices for you. > is there something cool that you get from Arch ? - A system completely customized to your software tastes. You can do this with Fedora and Ubuntu after the fact, but you're not building those systems from the ground up. - Unadulterated software. Arch keeps downstream patching to an absolute minimum. I'm running Gnome, not Gnome patched hundreds of times over to work with hundreds of external dependencies. - A huge and well-maintained repository of unofficial software packages. Again, you get this with the popular distros, but Arch has a very decent canonical experience compared to them. I personally did not like dealing with PPAs to get user-packaged software on Ubuntu, for example. - Current software. I run mainline kernels and the latest open-source graphics drivers with what I consider to be a reasonable testing buffer. What I consider reasonable is most likely not what others consider reasonable.
- solnyshok 11y ago
  you can get Arch with GUI installer via Antergos distribution
- farresito 11y ago
  Arch is not too difficult to install. Granted, if you don't have much free time, then better to spend it doing something else. The first time I installed Arch was five years ago. I had no idea about the Linux shell or command line, yet the manuals were quite good that I managed go do it with no problem. I personally love Pacman. For some reason, Ubuntu always ends up creating conflicts that I can't manually resolve (when installing things outside of the official repositories). I never get those issues with AUR. If you have time, give it a try; otherwise, don't lose sleep over it. You always have Manjaro (albeit I think it uses different repositories) or Antergos (not sure about this, either. I remember reading about a distro that used the official Arch repos, but can't remember the name).
- draven 11y ago
  "how's the install experience these days ?" I have no idea, I installed my current Arch 3 or 4 years ago and kept it updated since then. I do not remember it being difficult at the time. "is there something cool that you get from Arch ?" Everything is up to date, I love the package manager and the AUR (the user contributed "packages" in the form of instructions to build a package) w/ devel packages (ie you can easily install git versions of some software.) I use yaourt as a front-end. I use it to manage configuration files (and manually merge upstream config files with my locally modified files.) The distro feels lightweight (I'm not using any DE, only Xmonad, so that may help), and there's not too much "magic", in the sense that you can easily find everything in config files. It kinda feels like a BSD system in that regard. I'm learning Haskell and lots of up to date packages are available in Arch, I would not be surprised if Arch is one of the most popular distros among Haskell devs. The Arch wiki has every bit of information you need for the initial setup, then reading Arch's website main page before a "big" update should be enough (they post instructions for important migrations there, when the upgrade could require some manual intervention.)
- xiaq 11y ago
  > how's the install experience these days? It really depends on how you define "experience". For me, I like the manual installation procedure like everything else on Arch. Sure, it is not "easy". But the point is that you are taught to do things with standard Linux tools, save the package manager and a few straightforward shell scripts. Arch doesn't give you all sorts of fancy, "automated", distro-specific tools to make your life easier, because easy life is a temporary illusion in the fast-changing -- and by consequence, always broken -- world that is Linux desktop. Automated tools that made you life easier yesterday will likely make your life harder tomorrow, due to all the changes in upstream software these tools try to hide. Keeping such tools up to date will require continued interest in the development, something Linux desktop community never really succeeded to deliver. Arch just puts you in the real, wild landscape of Linux desktop. It may not be comfortable at first, but that's how Linux desktop is.
- rhinoceraptor 11y ago
  If you've got Intel graphics, wireless, etc. the process is pretty straightforward. You can even install over wifi from the install media. The software availability is the biggest reason I use it, pretty much everything that could be installed is available through the main repos or AUR.
- l1ambda 11y ago
  I went back to Fedora from Arch on desktop because Arch is tough to install. I have servers/workstations running Arch, CentoS and actually notice a lot of times the Fedora packages are often updated faster than Arch packages now. Also CentOS/Fedora give you selinux whereas Arch does not have that. (I'm not trying to rag on Arch at all, just stating my recent experience.) My servers running Arch I plan to migrate to CentOS 7 for selinux and more enterprisey updates. Also I need to use ZFS with some servers in the future and I believe there is a fairly easy way to do that with CentOS. Actually it looks like this is easy to do with Arch, too. The arch wiki is amazing. Wayland is quite good in Fedora 23 now. The GNOME Maps app works now (it uses 3D) on my Radeon R9 290x. It didn't work in Fedora 22. I'm running Wayland now as my daily driver.
  - deviantways 11y ago
    Arch gives you a PAX/Grsecurity kernel which makes your system orders of magnitude less insecure than what CentOS gives you. You can use Grsecurity RSBAC features if you need access controls. In terms of security though, Fedora is getting better since it is defaulting to hardened packages but no hardened kernel.
- nogbit 11y ago
  Give Manjaro a shot! It's Arch with a GUI installer. So if you don't have the time to do a full manual install it's so worth it and super fast. Give the XFCE iso a shot and you will be impressed. I ran Arch for years and recently had a build a new machine and went with Manjaro.
ShaneOG 11y ago
Is anyone running Arch on a 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 13"? I've seen conflicting reports of things working and not working, which is making me hesitant to try (I want to dual boot Max OS X)
- dmix 11y ago
  Yep I have previously used Arch on a 2013 Retina. Worked fine. The Arch wiki has pages dedicated to Macbooks if you need help. The only issue I had with macbooks was the wifi card was not detected by the installer after booting from USB. It works fine after installing a package using pacman once you get internet. So I always keep a cheap $10 Netgear USB wifi for installs which always works by default. Most people who have issues with installing Arch are almost always just new to Arch or Linux. I had a lot of issues starting out with Arch but after the first 6 months learning curve I rarely had issues. I have been using it for over two years now on a daily basis, across multiple Macbook and Thinkpads models and custom desktop build. It has been very stable and though most software versions are often 1-2 yrs ahead of Debian/Fedora. I actually had way more problems while using Fedora for two years prior than I ever did with Arch. The Arch package library (AUR), wiki, and pacman provide a very strong foundation for using Linux as a desktop.

sspiff 11y ago

systemd has been the default init system for most distro's for quite a while now. Gnome is just one of the many desktop environments (and I wouldn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole). Wayland is nice though, and it's nice to see it reach the level of maturity to become the default display server on a popular distribution.

vegabook 11y ago
Two questions: a) does using Wayland in Fedora 23 offer the ability to scale the UI across different DPI monitors in a consistent way in Fedora 23? And b) am I going to get significant problems with Wayland on applications such as VirtualBox (running Windows inside it), terminal emulators Tmux, etc, and of course, browsers (Firefox?)? Ie is it usable without too much compromise?
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  not right now. I think multi-monitor support is broken right now. In fact, FYI - the version of X in F23 is bleeding edge and does not supporting binary nvidia drivers (yet)

keypusher 11y ago

The way this comment is phrased is a bit misleading. FC23 is not the first distro to have have access to each of those four things individually, and some of those things are not even new to this Fedora release. Systemd has been the default init system in Fedora for a couple years now, and DNF (new package manager) came in Fedora 22. For the actual changes go here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/23/ChangeSet https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/23/ChangeSet

sandGorgon 11y ago
I did not realize at the time I posted, but this is kicking up quite a bit of storm. but I really enjoyed using the shiny new Wayland in F23 (where it is reasonably stable to the point of using it as a daily driver). you are right, it is not the first release to have access to each... but IMHO the first release where everything works seamlessly. YMMV.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
Fedora 22 also has a wayland preview mode.

devit 11y ago

It might be time to switch to a package management paradigm that doesn't require SAT solvers. For example, one in which packages do not conflict because they are installed in a directory for each package, and there is an "alternatives" mechanism for any global choice.

tyho 11y ago
What and have the dependencies for each package in the package directory node_modules style? No thanks, at least not unless it is on a file system that deals with duplicate subtrees within the filesystem.
- devit 11y ago
  Just support installing multiple library versions "side-by-side".
  - e12e 11y ago
    I prefer to just have the zlib-version without known buffer overflows, thank you. That will generally mean fixes are backported to a frozen api that is known to work wit a subset of packages (say 10.000 or so). No changes (except less undocumented behaviour/crashes) on security patching. Feature changes are ok on release upgrades.
JdeBP 11y ago
Daniel J. Bernstein, around the turn of the century, proposed a /package hierarchy (for package management without the need for conflict resolution) and a /command directory. * http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html * http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html Their major problem was the idea that one had to register things with what was to most of the world just some bloke on another continent. But they had concepts like a hierarchical package naming scheme ("admin/", "mail/", &c.), self-contained build trees with versioned names, symbolic links to denote "currently selected version", and an "index"/"alternatives" directory full of symbolic links.

weavie 11y ago

How well does it work on macbbooks? I had a painful experience a while ago trying to install Arch on my mac. It kept freezing up, so I had to give up as I had a load of other things to do. I would really like to have another bash at getting Linux going on it.

bsg75 11y ago

> There are liveusb (for macbooks as well) Specific Mac images, or the main live USB image works on Macs?

bwindels 11y ago

was really looking forward to this as well, but couldn't get it to run on my mbp6,2