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."

Comments

It's a meta joke

[Gothmolly]

Heisenbug - nice. A fitting name for a bleeding edge distro.

Re:It's a meta joke

[sconeu]

They've stolen the Microsoft timer code!!!!!!

Re:Whoopty do

[Desler]

There has been a minimal Ubuntu install that you can then install your DE of choice on top of since at least 8.04.

Re:Whoopty do

[AdamWill]

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.

Yes!

[Peter H.S.]

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.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes!
I've struggled for months trying to use things like grep and less, you've no idea how many weeks I've been stumped trying to use cat!

I've been playing with journalctl, and I've managed to learn it all within about 3 days! It's a miracle! Now I can finally drop the endless nights spent scrolling through logs with less!!

If only we could have a tool to change plain text files to systemd log format, and I could use the wonder that is journalctl to parse and find things in them, instead of awful grep. There should be a text edit built in to systemd that does this and allows me to edit files and configurations, imagine how much better it would all be with this wonder of journalctl!

Re:So when's the next LTS?

[kthreadd]

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.

Fedora vs. Ubuntu - Why these comparisons suck

[hduff]

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.