Slashdot Mirror
Fedora 26 Linux Distro Released (betanews.com)
Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, Fedora 26 sheds its pre-release status and becomes available for download as a stable release. GNOME fans are in for a big treat, as version 3.24 is default. If you stick to stable Fedora releases, this will be your first time experiencing that version of the desktop environment since it was released in March. Also new is LibreOffice 5.3, which is an indispensable suite for productivity. If you still use mp3 music files I've moved onto streaming), support should be baked in for both encoding and decoding. "The latest version of Fedora's desktop-focused edition provides new tools and features for general users as well as developers. GNOME 3.24 is offered with Fedora 26 Workstation, which includes a host of updated functionality including Night Light, an application that subtly changes screen color based on time of day to reduce effect on sleep patterns, and LibreOffice 5.3, the latest update to the popular open source office productivity suite. For developers, GNOME 3.24 provides matured versions of Builder and Flatpak to make application development for a variety of systems, including Rust and Meson, easier across the board," says the Fedora Project.
I run it. It's really stable anymore, I run some CentOS servers so using the precursor to stuff hitting that is nice, it's nice to develop on (devassistant is a little bonus), and it usually has the latest Gnome.
And, if so, why? Inertia? Just curious.
We use Fedora exclusively at work. Reason? It is rock solid, yet up to date. And no fiddling to get stuff to work. It is professional grade.
We tested many other distros and no other one lived up to the hype. Debian stable (and testing) were outdated. Unstable was, well, unstable (to put it mildly). Ubuntu came with spyware and unusable desktop. It seemed very toy-like and it was very fragile. They also made weird decision regarding some packages and compiler options which made it not work with standard apps (for example, bash was replaced with dash, etc). Mint was Ubuntu but without the retarded desktop. Arch was decent but required a lot of fiddling. The list goes on.
There are a lot of reasons to use Fedora especially if you also run RHEL. Fedora makes a good fileserver, SFTP server, small MySQL server etc. Sometimes you don't need support and until lately there was no upgrade path for RHEL short of reinstalling... Fedora lets me upgrade it. It has newer drivers than RHEL (NTFS write support for instance) and lets me try out new features before they become part of RHEL.
I have tried Mandrake, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Knoppix, etc.
Fedora is very good at having lots of easily installable bells and whistles, but still being extremely stable.
You are quite misinformed. Fedora is certainly not the RHEL testing branch. It is an excelent distribution for the desktop. RHEL is for servers. I could go on, but why bother. You don't want Linux. You want XP, but with security patches.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I dumped Fedora for the same reason, but returned when Red Hat relaxed its lifecycle: my desktop is on Fedora 24, which still receives updates. I will probably upgrade to Fedora 26.
RHEL/CentOS is great for servers, but its upgrade cycle is too slow for the desktop.
Fedora is often mis-characterised as the testing branch for RHEL, but in fact its release engineering and updates are at least as good as those of any other desktop distro.