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Fedora 21 Alpha Released

Posted by timothy on from the every-release-represents-years-of-work dept.

An anonymous reader writes Fedora 21 Alpha has been released. After encountering multiple delays, the first development version is out for the Fedora.NEXT and Fedora 21 products. Fedora 21 features improved Wayland support, GNOME 3.14, many updated packages, greater server and cloud support, and countless other improvements with Fedora 20 already being nearly one year old.

6 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Is this allowed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    *tips fedora*

  2. How about Wayland? by Parker+Lewis · · Score: 2

    Some already test it?

  3. Will it come with... by rgbatduke · · Score: 2

    Gnome 2 as an option (by whatever name) or only the insanity of windowing systems designed for finger-picking-tablets forced upon keystroke oriented users of actual computers doing real work in many windows on several desktops?

    Otherwise, Centos 6 may end up being the last release I ever use. G2 may or may not be perfect, but I've got it more comfortable than five year old denim jeans and G3 sucked and continues to suck and AFAICT will continue to suck, forever, amen.

    rgb

    --
    Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    1. Re:Will it come with... by rgbatduke · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I spent around a year with it on at least a few of the systems I use. But I have G2 hotwired to cycle windows, open xterms, switch desktops, and fully use its autohide bars which are already laid out with everything I need and little that I don't. I do most of my work in either a browser or xterms, but I have that work in many different subjects with several windows open per subject spread out over 6 desktops that are a keystroke away. G3's window switching mechanism when I used it was arcane and enormously slow in comparison.

      The real problem is that while a fork was perhaps needed, they did it wrong. G2 was close to perfect for what it was designed to do -- if nothing else its flaws were all flaws we all had worked around, and it had/has (I'm still using it, personally) some really nice features. Forking off a tablet version of Gnome is just peachy, but it should have been a TABLET VERSION fork, not an abandonment of the mainstream, widely deployed G2 in favor of a tablet friendlier interface that was enormously clunky on a non-tablet desktop or even laptop.

      Sometimes there is change because it is needed, sometimes there is change for the sake of change. I sadly think that G3 is ten parts of the latter for one part of the former. Change involves pain either way, but at least one can see some advantage to doing so.

      What exactly are the advantages -- not the places where yeah, with work and possibly more slowly you can make it function but actual advantages -- of G3, in particular advantages that one couldn't have implemented just as easily as new features of G2 without necessarily breaking old features that were heavily in use?

      I'm not seein' a lot of those. I can launch any application I want under G2 with a key combination, for every application I ever launch, and don't even use that feature any more for anything but xterms because I use a lot of those to do work in. Window )cycling and desktop switching, though, those I use all of the time. Miniapps and application bar launchers, I use those. I don't care about animation. I don't need finger swipe screens. I don't need to have to work to find applications listed in a neat sorted order, or to have to change "views" to access certain features. I login (rarely), pop a single instance of firefox up, and from then on most of what I do is either browser based or xterm based, and I can pop an xterm up with Ctrl-Alt-P in far less than 1 second on the fly, then cycle up through a whole stack of windows with Ctrl-Shift-F to the one I want, then jump to desktop 6 (F6) to set up some music, then back to desktop 3 (F3) to work on something I'm writing, and then...

      Maybe I can do all of this (and preserve the macros etc) in Mate. I suppose I should give it a try, maybe in a VM or something. Heck, maybe I'll install a full fedora VM to try it again -- I think I have the room. I used to use Fedora all the time before G3, but it was a serious show stopper.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    2. Re: Will it come with... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I hear ya! Well written. This is exactly how I use my system. I now use XFCE 4.11 copr for Fedora-20. Highly stripped an G3 removed. Never looked back.

      My next Fedora will be 22 or whatever they name it. I hope they still offer Xfce Spins by then, so I can go directly to Xfce.

      G3 is bulky and they recently spread all type of settings everywhere.

      Now you have menu entries for apps close to the activities of your GShell. Then buttons in the Window decorator itself (usually a round thing in a button) and menu entries in the apps menu. Spread in 3 places. Also print has been hidden under settings flags. Also buttons have no margin anymore and placed in the corners. G3 is a horror!

      Sorry I stay woth Xfce. If that fails too one day, I switch to Windows.

  4. conflicting by Livius · · Score: 2

    Aren't 'alpha' and 'release' contradictions in terms?

    (Yes, I know 'alpha' actually is a kind of release, but it's not a release to the public at large.)