10 ms·

Fedora 27 released

287 points by gtirloni 9y ago

s_kilk 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- ufo 9y ago
  Fedora 26 came out a bit late so Fedora 27 had a shorter release cycle to compensate.
  - dralley 9y ago
    That's not the real reason.
- jandrese 9y ago
  I'm mostly still using Ubuntu, but I did install a Fedora 26 box to see how well it works these days. I've been pretty happy with the results. Ubuntu is just a little too conservative with their package management sometimes and Fedora seems like a decent answer to that problem.
walkingolof 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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-gnome-linux http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scaling...
  - lima 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - jacek 9y ago
    I absolutely loved AUR repository and I wish Fedora had something similar. However, with rolling release, something has always been broken: Gnome, GDM, Wayland session, suspend/wakeup, bluetooth. Update would often fix one thing and break another.
    - mhd 9y ago
      Nix/Guix as a better AUR replacement is something I want to try in the near future (maybe even pkgsrc if that's still a thing on Linux). Right now, I just compile myself and "stow" stuff (and sometimes use AUR for the build recipes).
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
jcastro 9y ago
Does anyone know if the Atomic Host will auto update from 26->27 or is it a manual process?
- rageear 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    And here's a handy upgrade guide: http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-atomic-26-to-27-upgrade/ http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-atomic-26-to...
ufo 9y ago
Is Firefox 57 already out in Fedora 27, by any chance?
- jacek 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I'm guessing this doesn't apply to those who are on KDE?
    - jacek 9y ago
      KDE handles Gtk3 CSD well. I think that might work. I haven't tried it on KDE though.
- lima 9y ago
  Yep! https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/firefox https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/firefox
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gtycomb 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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
DCKing 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago
porfirium 9y ago
Wayland out of the box?
- cverna 9y ago
  Wayland is the default display server since Fedora 25.
  - alphadevx 9y ago
    Yeah but frankly its been kinda beta, not quite "it just works" so far.
    - chisleu 9y ago
      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.
  - zumu 9y ago
    Is this true on spins as well, or just the default gnome install?
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Only GNOME.
- alphadevx 9y ago
  I hope so. On Fedora 26 I still have to drop back to X11 in order to get my XPS13 to properly detect my external monitor (DisplayPort), Wayland will only allow the default lowest resolution with no option to increase it, which is very sad on a 28" 4K screen :-( Will give Fedora 27 a go this evening and see...
  - zlynx 9y ago
    I have a very similar setup: a Dell m3800 and a 4K external monitor. Wayland, or rather gnome-shell, seems to do EDID detection a bit differently than Xorg. Getting a higher quality DisplayPort cable fixed it for me. The earlier cable did OK at 30Hz but freaked out trying for 60 Hz. X11 must retry more times, because it would usually manage to make it work for a while on the bad cable, although it still could randomly flicker off and reset the connection.
dualogy 9y ago
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 =)
- jadbox 9y ago
  i3 with Fedora runs flawlessly for me out of the box: dnf install i3 i3status dmenu i3lock
  - kevinherron 9y ago
    On what version of Fedora? Wayland has been enabled by default since F25 and i3wm does not work in Wayland... nor do the Nvidia drivers last I tried it...
    - rhodysurf 9y ago
      You can still run an x session out of the box. Wayland is just the session it defaults to when you load GDM for the first time.
sandGorgon 9y ago
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-macbook-air.12464/ https://www.linux.org/threads/installing-fedora-26-beta-on-a...
vesak 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I'll be also trying this on xorg, see if that helps any.
meesterdude 9y ago
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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pyrophane 9y ago
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.
- rhodysurf 9y ago
  It exists in Gnome 3.26 (IE Fedora 27) with an experimental flag. It works well, with the exception of some blurry text in random apps.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  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.
otto_ortega 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Worse, it's just a collection of shell scripts: https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/androidstudio.plugin/install.sh https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/an... It does no signature validation whatsoever or dependency tracking. Don't use it if you care about security or a clean system.
    - otto_ortega 9y ago
      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.
raintrees 9y ago
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...
- ufo 9y ago
  Fedora doesn't include any nonfree or patent encumbered software by default (for legal and project policy reasons). But if you really need flash you should be able to get it from 3rd party repositories.
- jhasse 9y ago
  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.
Tomte 9y ago
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 9y ago
  This is supported by GNOME Shell 3.26 which I'm currently running under Ubuntu 17.10.
ben_jones 9y ago
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?
- freedomben 9y ago
  That might just be the most controversial post on the internet, if indeed it exists.
- jononor 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Pretty much. I still recommend Xubuntu for new users since they can leverage the massive package base and stable releases of Ubuntu and move to something like Fedora (or Arch or whatever) later.
- milkmiruku 9y ago
  They might benefit from checking out https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux - includes a nice though two years out-of-date flowchart from /g/.
- ufo 9y ago
  Unfortunately, all the "distro picker" resources I have seen so far are of questionable quality. They either are too opinionated (use my favorite distro) or not opinionated enough (listing super niche distros for no good reason). That said, I agree with what jononor said. Using something similar that what your most helpful Linux-using friend uses trumps picking the most ideal distro and as long as you pick something relatively mainstream there isn't going to be that big of a difference anyway. In my experience, the choice of desktop environment (GNOME / KDE / MATE / etc) is actually more impactful than the choice of distro.
loop0 9y ago
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.
bmurphy1976 9y ago
How's the HIDPI support in Fedora these days? That's the #1 deal breaker for me and every single Linux distro.
- moosingin3space 9y ago
  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.
mrmondo 9y ago
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.
brightball 9y ago
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.
fpoling 9y ago
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_issues https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F27_bugs#Wayland_issue...
- nbaksalyar 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    ... which happens to be the exact opposite of what you want if you’re into deep learning. Sigh.
    - fpoling 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Yeah, you can actually do it. Just run desktop in your integrated Intel GPU and CUDA in NVIDIA discrete GPU.
throw2016 9y ago
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.
akulbe 9y ago
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.
keithpeter 9y ago
[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.

287 points by gtirloni 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
ufo 9y ago
Fedora 26 came out a bit late so Fedora 27 had a shorter release cycle to compensate.
- dralley 9y ago
  That's not the real reason.
jandrese 9y ago
I'm mostly still using Ubuntu, but I did install a Fedora 26 box to see how well it works these days. I've been pretty happy with the results. Ubuntu is just a little too conservative with their package management sometimes and Fedora seems like a decent answer to that problem.

walkingolof 9y ago

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 9y ago
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-gnome-linux http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scaling...
- lima 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- jacek 9y ago
  I absolutely loved AUR repository and I wish Fedora had something similar. However, with rolling release, something has always been broken: Gnome, GDM, Wayland session, suspend/wakeup, bluetooth. Update would often fix one thing and break another.
  - mhd 9y ago
    Nix/Guix as a better AUR replacement is something I want to try in the near future (maybe even pkgsrc if that's still a thing on Linux). Right now, I just compile myself and "stow" stuff (and sometimes use AUR for the build recipes).
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.

jcastro 9y ago

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

rageear 9y ago
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 9y ago
  And here's a handy upgrade guide: http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-atomic-26-to-27-upgrade/ http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/11/fedora-atomic-26-to...

ufo 9y ago

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

jacek 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I'm guessing this doesn't apply to those who are on KDE?
  - jacek 9y ago
    KDE handles Gtk3 CSD well. I think that might work. I haven't tried it on KDE though.
lima 9y ago
Yep! https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/firefox https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/firefox
deleted 9y ago
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gtycomb 9y ago

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 9y ago
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

DCKing 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago

porfirium 9y ago

Wayland out of the box?

cverna 9y ago
Wayland is the default display server since Fedora 25.
- alphadevx 9y ago
  Yeah but frankly its been kinda beta, not quite "it just works" so far.
  - chisleu 9y ago
    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.
- zumu 9y ago
  Is this true on spins as well, or just the default gnome install?
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Only GNOME.
alphadevx 9y ago
I hope so. On Fedora 26 I still have to drop back to X11 in order to get my XPS13 to properly detect my external monitor (DisplayPort), Wayland will only allow the default lowest resolution with no option to increase it, which is very sad on a 28" 4K screen :-( Will give Fedora 27 a go this evening and see...
- zlynx 9y ago
  I have a very similar setup: a Dell m3800 and a 4K external monitor. Wayland, or rather gnome-shell, seems to do EDID detection a bit differently than Xorg. Getting a higher quality DisplayPort cable fixed it for me. The earlier cable did OK at 30Hz but freaked out trying for 60 Hz. X11 must retry more times, because it would usually manage to make it work for a while on the bad cable, although it still could randomly flicker off and reset the connection.

dualogy 9y ago

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 =)

jadbox 9y ago
i3 with Fedora runs flawlessly for me out of the box: dnf install i3 i3status dmenu i3lock
- kevinherron 9y ago
  On what version of Fedora? Wayland has been enabled by default since F25 and i3wm does not work in Wayland... nor do the Nvidia drivers last I tried it...
  - rhodysurf 9y ago
    You can still run an x session out of the box. Wayland is just the session it defaults to when you load GDM for the first time.

sandGorgon 9y ago

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

vesak 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I'll be also trying this on xorg, see if that helps any.

meesterdude 9y ago

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.

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pyrophane 9y ago

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.

rhodysurf 9y ago
It exists in Gnome 3.26 (IE Fedora 27) with an experimental flag. It works well, with the exception of some blurry text in random apps.
dguaraglia 9y ago
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.

otto_ortega 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Worse, it's just a collection of shell scripts: https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/androidstudio.plugin/install.sh https://github.com/folkswithhats/fedy/blob/master/plugins/an... It does no signature validation whatsoever or dependency tracking. Don't use it if you care about security or a clean system.
  - otto_ortega 9y ago
    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.

raintrees 9y ago

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...

ufo 9y ago
Fedora doesn't include any nonfree or patent encumbered software by default (for legal and project policy reasons). But if you really need flash you should be able to get it from 3rd party repositories.
jhasse 9y ago
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.

Tomte 9y ago

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 9y ago
This is supported by GNOME Shell 3.26 which I'm currently running under Ubuntu 17.10.

ben_jones 9y ago

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?

freedomben 9y ago
That might just be the most controversial post on the internet, if indeed it exists.
jononor 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Pretty much. I still recommend Xubuntu for new users since they can leverage the massive package base and stable releases of Ubuntu and move to something like Fedora (or Arch or whatever) later.
milkmiruku 9y ago
They might benefit from checking out https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux - includes a nice though two years out-of-date flowchart from /g/.
ufo 9y ago
Unfortunately, all the "distro picker" resources I have seen so far are of questionable quality. They either are too opinionated (use my favorite distro) or not opinionated enough (listing super niche distros for no good reason). That said, I agree with what jononor said. Using something similar that what your most helpful Linux-using friend uses trumps picking the most ideal distro and as long as you pick something relatively mainstream there isn't going to be that big of a difference anyway. In my experience, the choice of desktop environment (GNOME / KDE / MATE / etc) is actually more impactful than the choice of distro.

loop0 9y ago

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.

bmurphy1976 9y ago

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

moosingin3space 9y ago
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.

mrmondo 9y ago

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.

brightball 9y ago

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.

fpoling 9y ago

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_issues https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F27_bugs#Wayland_issue...

nbaksalyar 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  ... which happens to be the exact opposite of what you want if you’re into deep learning. Sigh.
  - fpoling 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Yeah, you can actually do it. Just run desktop in your integrated Intel GPU and CUDA in NVIDIA discrete GPU.

throw2016 9y ago

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.

akulbe 9y ago

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.

keithpeter 9y ago

[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.