Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Fedora 22 Workstation Review

For its last release, Fedora has abandoned its long established six-month release cycle to bring about a number of organizational and systemic changes. The chief among these was the release of three distinct editions: Workstation, Cloud, and Server. The other major change was the announcement of Fedora.next, which is the name for the Fedora Project’s roadmap for the next decade.

With the latest release, the distro returns to a six-month release cycle but continues to produce the three editions. Each edition builds on a common base and all the necessary packages are then added to make the edition suitable for the assigned function. 



We’ve chosen to review the Workstation edition, which is available as an ISO for 32- and 64-bit machines. This live installable edition is designed for home users, but is perfectly suited for professionals and can quickly be turned into a developer’s haven.

Cutting edge

As a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora is uniquely positioned to deliver innovative technologies to new users. It’s a distro that ships with the latest software and this release is no different.

The Gnome Display Manager (GDM) now defaults to Wayland display server instead of X.org. While the default Gnome session still uses X, the next Fedora release will most likely default to Wayland.

The distro features Gnome 3.16, which has a large number of visual improvements and new features. The notification area has been revamped and notifications now appear anchored to the center of the top bar. An unobtrusive marker informs you of any unread notifications, such as background terminal jobs, chat messages, updates, etc.

The Files application, login screen, Activities overview, and various other parts of the desktop, feature an updated look. Boxes, the default application for managing virtual and remote machines features has, among other things, a revamped box creation assistant, and various improvements to the Preferences dialogs.

The Software app, which has come a long way since its introduction in Fedora 20, now also lets you install extras, such as fonts and codecs, apart from installing updates and fetching new software. This robust tool is as friendly as Ubuntu Software Center, and just as fast and efficient.

Fedora 22 is the first release that doesn’t use Yum as the package manager. Instead, it uses DNF – a fork of Yum – that offers similar functionality and relies on the same RPM package repositories as always. Under the hood, DNF uses an improved dependency resolver, hawkey, and since DNF is command-line compatible with Yum, most of the Yum commands, such as install, groupinstall, remove, etc., work the same way with DNF.

Fedora has often been described as not ideal for new users but the improved Anaconda installer is quite friendly. We note that although it doesn’t feature major changes, compared to the last release, it seems a bit sluggish. The positioning of the buttons at the top in the installer continues to boggle the mind, but the installer itself is as good as alternatives found in other distros.

Existing Fedora users will appreciate the various visual improvements and feature additions in the latest release. For those already running a RPM-based distro, Fedora 22 is robust, stable, and fast enough to tempt you away from your current distro.

Verdict

We give a total rating of 96/100 for Fedora 22 Workstation. It is a Solid office, internet, and multimedia software, coupled with user-friendly tools makes it an all-round distro. To download Fedora 22, go here.


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