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Fedora 20 Released
sfcrazy writes "The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 20, code named Heisenbug (release notes). Fedora 20 is dedicated to Seth Vidal, the lead developer of Yum and the Fedora update repository, who recently died in a road accident. Gnome is the default DE of Fedora, and so it is for Fedora 20. However unlike Ubuntu (where they had to create different distros for each DE) Fedora comes with KDE, XFCE, LXDE and MATE. You can install the DE of your choice on top of base Fedora."
Heisenbug - nice. A fitting name for a bleeding edge distro.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What is wrong with a nice VM?
Who dedicates real hardware to test these days?
Can't you do that on Ubuntu too? I thought the different distros really were just installation defaults.
There has been a minimal Ubuntu install that you can then install your DE of choice on top of since at least 8.04.
And even if you install Unity-flavored Ubuntu and want to switch to, say, Cinnamon, just add the PPA and go.
Not sure why Ubuntu is even mentioned in the summary. I'm sure the summary containing a story about someone dying could've been written a little more tastefully.
They were asking for that joke ( fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp ). Well, you have to name it something I guess.
That's why CentOS exists, no?
We (Fedora) didn't write anything comparing the way we provide desktops to how Ubuntu does it. That's something the person who submitted the story wrote. It's not a comparison we'd find particularly interesting, I don't think.
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 and systemd, yes!
I really like Fedora. Been using it since Fedora Core 1 (and Red Hat before that). It has been rock solid for me all these years, and it just keeps on improving.
The new "systemd" internal plumbing system is a joy to use. "journalctl" is the finest new system tool I have seen for many years; it is really fast, and its superb autocompletion reduces typing to a minimum.
"$ journalctl -F _SYSTEMD_UNIT" instantly show all systemd services that has ever written to the log file.
"$ journalctl -b -1 -p err" filters the log file, so that only errors are shown (-p err) from the previous boot (-b -1, current boot is just "-b" etc.).
A tremendous help for newbies who now doesn't need to learn 'cat', 'grep', 'less' and piping in order to do basic log file inspection.
Besides improving my systemd skills, the next spare time project I will try on Fedora 20 is lightweight containers. They seems like a useful addition to full blown virtual guests.
Fedora does not provide an LTS like release. Every release is maintained for 13 months, and new releases are usually released about every six months. The idea is that if you want a more long term release you should really go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is based on Fedora.
I noticed huge system slowdown with the introduction of journald. I noticed huge performance loss in reading and writing files on my hard drive. After some investigation I figured out that journald is the cause of all the slowness. After killing the process (multiple times) I figured out that the performance in writing and reading comes back to normal (used to know) speed. After investigating I figured out that after using the system that journald has created around 100-150mb of metafiles in /var/log/systemd and I am quite sure that I never had a software that generated so much logfile information.
Fedora already supports releases for 12 months, as the most recent 2 releases are supported. Fedora 19 has been out for six months, and will be supported for a further six (or so!) months until Fedora 21 is released. In contrast, Ubuntu only supports its releases for 9 months, except for the LTS releases.
You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.
Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The biggest differences between them are admin tools and init/rc stuff as well as the language the tools are written in. The packaging systems (RPM vs .DEB) are really not as great a difference since they accomplish essentially the same thing overall. The biggest packaging difference is how they name things and where they put them; this is also the most frustrating difference.
You'll notice that most general/new-release distro reviews are superficial, noting things like application/kernel version numbers and what DE is chosen and what default apps are installed -- all meaningless since any DE and most any app and most any kernel can be installed on any distro. These are reviews written by newbies for newbies. Apparently the people who know the significant underlying differences don't write reviews or don't know enough about other distros to draw a meaningful comparison.
Here's a review I wrote comparing Mageia with Fedora, which I hope is not the typical kind of review.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2013/01/mageia3-beta-vs-fedora18.html
Why not compare these to Ubuntu? Behind the scenes where it matters, it's too different from Fedora/Mageia for me to get a handle on it without obtaining a more intimate knowledge of Ubuntu, something I have no real need or desire to do. My only gripe about Ubuntu is that too much software is developed for it that is reliant on Ubuntu-specific scripts and such things that it cannot easily be used on other Linux distros; HOWTOs written for Ubuntu are so Ubuntu-specific that they are rendered almost useless for any other distro (they seem to be written by the same folks that write the superficial reviews).
sfcrazy and others do Fedora and Ubuntu a disservice by making these uninformed and superficial comparisons.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I've always had best luck with even Fedora releases. I'm still on Fedora 14 and have been patiently waiting for 20 to hit the shelves.
They have a long term release - it's called Red Hat.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Exactly.
What was wrong with linking directly to Fedora site.
I'm so sick of these spamvertisement sites that rush up a page and post it on Slashdot, that I virtually never click the first link.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think there was a systemd bug that caused syslog to freak out. But besides that, systemd-journald is lightening fast and lightweight on a proper systemd distro like Fedora. It on takes 300 K memory (+3 Megabyte shared mem) on my desktop system. I haven't seen it even suck up 1% CPU time ever.
systemd often keeps logfiles around for longer than many syslog implementations that uses a simple cron/time based logrotate. Since the journal is indexed size isn't really a issue.
You can tweak the maximum size etc., but it unless you are starved for space, a couple of hundred megabytes for many months of log files aren't bad.
Also, systemd-journald logs much more that any sysvinit/syslog implementation is capable of, especially stuff that happens early in the boot process.
All in all I find that "systemd-journald" is extremely fast and resource lightweight, and I just love how well designed and documented the systemd tools are.
Yeah, it seemed to me to simply be a way to throw some gratuitous denigration and farts in the general of Ubuntu.
People can't seem to just report the news these days, they have to color it and use it as a springboard for their own
pet peeves and preferences. Something learned from the mainstream media I guess.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Just go for it. Fedora 20 is worth investing some time in, since it is systemd based and therefore shows the direction that most Linux distribution are heading. All the knowledge you gain about systemd and its tools like "journalctl" can be directly used in future Linux distro's like RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, etc.
So instead of wasting time getting to know a particular distros home made tools for eg. managing daemons, you can learn a set of standard tools that can be deployed exactly the same way across many different Linux distributions.
I think any System Admin out there should seriously start to learn systemd, even if their present production servers doesn't support it yet, because some day they will.