Fedora

Reader supplied reviews for Fedora Average rating 8.3 from 290 review(s) What are your thoughts on Fedora? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- rawhide393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 39 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-12-03 Votes: 7 Of course there are a few annoyances still (the installer is less intuitive and more fidgety than Ubuntu's, or almost any other distribution, particularly when partitioning the drive) but Fedora has an otherwise pleasant, predictable quality to it. It is still leading- if not bleeding-edge, so you don't have that FOMO on newer software versions. Generic Gnome is my preferred interface anyway, so basic Fedora suits me fine. I can set up a new box fully, with add-ons and configuration, in half an hour. All in all, it's a pretty darned pleasant experience. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 39 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-11-30 Votes: 8 I don't love Fedora. I don't like Red Hat. Just being honest here… There is a time to discuss politics, religion, and other sensitive subjects, but then there is a time when you have to swallow your beliefs because you need the right tool for the job. This is where Fedora Sericea comes to the rescue! I need an immutable distro to protect me from my evil self. My evil self loves to break my software. My evil self prefers to install a third-party package instead of what's on the distro. Finally, when I need to use my computer, there is a lot of garbage, leftover installation and configuration files, and a lot of unsupported and obsolete software. It really is a requirement for me to use an immutable distro. After doing my research, I found lots of immutable distros, but they either lack the necessary solidity, or otherwise simply don't support the software I need. I saw great comments about OpenSuse, but as of the time of this writing, their Gnome installation is still a release candidate. Contrary to my ideals, I installed SilverBlue and (WOW!) I was beyond impressed. It just worked! Flawlessly! I loaded everything I needed on it, and it begged for more. My evil self tried to break it, and it denied all attempts. Kudos!!! My problem with Gnome is that it's too mouse intensive, and for my day to day usage the keyboard is my friend. That's why I prefer a tiling window manager. Sway, i3, and dwm, just to name a few, are second nature to me. Fedora Sericea was quick to install and configure, and (knock on wood) has been serving me very well. I'll talk politics and religion some other time. Right now I just want to enjoy my new old computer. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 39 Rating: 7 Date: 2023-11-23 Votes: 6 As per my previous review, I installed an immutable version of F39 on my second machine ... and it was GNOME (Silverblue). My intention to install immutable Budgie (Onyx) failed, as explained later. What does "immutable" mean? To simplify and probably horrify the purists, it puts the whole operating system under source code control. The operating system is read-only; to update it, it is checked out and made read-write, the updates downloaded then merged into a new snapshot of the OS, then the old snapshot is retired and the machine reboots to the new snapshot. If the reboot fails, the operating system automatically rolls back to the last good snapshot. (It is also possible to boot to previous snapshots from the boot screen). Making the operating system read-only and knowing exactly what files and folders are in it are clearly huge security improvements in themselves, but there are trade-offs. The big one is (not) installing RPMs, except by a laborious and tacitly discouraged process of inserting them into the snapshot; RPMs and an immutable system are contradictory as an RPM, on installation, would attempt to add and remove files from the read-only folders! So the immutable system's updater is not dnf/yum, which doesn't exist; it is rpm-ostree. I was nearly stuck because I had to install restic in order to restore backups, but solved that by downloading a binary from restic's Web site and putting it into my home folder. Hence the default "installation package" is flatpaks; even some standard GNOME applications are flatpaks and I have over 40 flatpaks installed already. Fortunately, somehow, the problems I have had elsewhere where some flatpaks are prone to crashing are not seen here. Interestingly, Firefox is not a flatpak (although there is nothing stopping you installing Mozilla's flatpak) so, when it is updated, it is evidently inserted into the build. The real GNOME basics (nautilus, gnome-terminal and similar) are also insertions. Update feels different from traditional Fedora as all the action takes place before reboot - pressing the Update & Reboot button in GNOME Software results in a pause of several minutes while the new snapshot is created, then the reboot switches to the new snapshot instantly. It would be useful to have some visual indication of how the snapshot creation is going; the information is there as rpm-ostree update gives a wealth of feedback on the command line. Unfortunately, the F39 Budgie immutable version (Onyx) is broken - for some reason its updates stop on 3 November (three weeks back at the time of writing), which negates the whole point of immutability (a more secure operating system). I tried twice then gave up and switched to GNOME (Silverblue). The rating is difficult. I say 7 because, although the technology is superb, I suspect that the constraints on what can be installed will be too much for many home users. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 290 reader reviews of Fedora...