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Fedora 17 has arrived. The Fedora Project has nicknamed this release "Beefy Miracle," promising "over and under the bun improvements that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free software."
That's a bold claim for such a ridiculous name and while this is a solid update, with some significant improvements under the hood and the latest version of the GNOME desktop, as we noted in the beta review, there's nothing particularly miraculous about it.
A miraculous Fedora 17 would have included support for Btrfs (the kernel at least supports Btrfs), but that's going to require a major re-write of the Anaconda installer interface and has been postponed until at least Fedora 18. A miraculous Fedora 17 might also have somehow wrangled the full complement of GNOME apps into supporting the new application-level menu in GNOME 3.4. Impossible you say? Fedora has almost nothing to do with development of GNOME apps? Exactly, but it certainly would have been miraculous if Fedora has done it nonetheless.
Instead we have a very nice new version of Fedora that, while not miraculous, is well worth grabbing, especially for those of us still trying to adjust to GNOME 3.
GNOME 3.4 continues to polish GNOME 3, particularly the shell where the search features have improved significantly. Not only do results come up much faster, the shell is much better at guessing what you want. It does not, however, show results for applications that are in the repos but not yet installed, a nice new feature you'll find in the latest version of Ubuntu's Unity search tool.
GNOME 3.4 also introduces a new application level menu that sits on the top of the GNOME Shell bar and contains items that affect the whole application. Anything that affects just the window remains in the window. The new app menu pretty much mirrors a very similar feature in Ubuntu's Unity interface, but unfortunately not all applications use the new menu yet, making GNOME 3.4 feel a bit unpredictable and more inconsistent than previous releases.
Naturally non-GNOME-specific apps like web browsers don't support the app menu, or if they do the only menu item is Quit. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that such apps, coming from well outside the GNOME world, never will support the new menu. Of course if user interface consistency is your highest priority, you probably aren't using Linux anyway.
The GNOME devs have put a good bit of effort into polishing GNOME interface where they can though. The 3.4 release includes smooth scrolling support and some redesigned applications like the Documents and Contacts apps, both of which now have a streamlined look that's more in line with the <a href="http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.0/">GNOME 3 human interface guidelines</a>.
However, despite some more polish on the GNOME 3 interface, GNOME 3 updates still feel like two steps forward, one step back. There's the might-be-there, might-not app menu to keep you on your toes of course, but even the improved scrolling brings with it smaller scrollbars which are harder to grab. So while the scrolling may be smoother, for some users it may actually be harder to scroll.
On the plus side Fedora 17's GNOME 3.4 can now run on hardware without a native 3D driver. The gnome-session app will no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver, which means the GNOME 3 interface will work without issues in virtual machines.
The GNOME application stack has been updated for this release with Fedora 17 shipping with the latest versions of the Evolution mail client, Firefox, Shotwell and others. The biggest app news though will no doubt be GIMP 2.8, which brings the long awaited single-window mode and gives the graphics editor a more Photoshop-like look and feel.
While much of the focus in Fedora lately has been on GNOME 3.x (since the distro has served as a showcase for GNOME 3), KDE fans need not feel left out. Fedora always updates KDE to the latest release, which in Fedora 17 means the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.8. The big news in KDE 4.8 is Dolphin 2.0, a significant rewrite of KDE's default file manager. Dolphin 2.0 includes a new "view engine," which should make browsing files faster, particularly with large directory listing and older, slower hard disks.
As with GNOME, the KDE update brings the latest versions of Kate, Kmail, Gwenview and the rest of the KDE application suite.
The desktop updates may be the most visible changes, but under the hood is where Fedora 17, like most Fedora releases, really starts to distinguish itself from other distros.
As mentioned above Fedora 17 uses version 3.3 of the Linux kernel, which means support for the Btrfs and ext4 filesystems. Fedora 17 will default to ext4. It is technically possible to install Fedora on Btrfs, but the process is tedious and definitely not for the faint of heart. The updated kernel also means support for the gma500 graphics driver, meaning that Intel's Poulsbo chipset should finally work for Linux users.
Fedora 17 marks the first steps in Fedora's great migration to a saner file system layout. Technically this is referred to as a "unified file system" layout. Instead of the current separation between /bin and /usr/bin or /sbin and /usr/sbin and so on -- all of which dates back to disk space issues that were solved decades ago -- everything will now live under /usr. It sounds more traumatic than it actually is; most users will never notice the change thanks to copious symlinks that make everything look pretty much the same for now.
Eventually though the directories really will be gone, leaving a cleaner and more predictable directory structure for application developers to work with. Fedora is the first of the major distros to tackle a unified file system, though most will likely follow suit.
Anyone looking to use Fedora 17 as a platform for the open source cloud computing project, OpenStack, will be happy to know that Fedora has updated to "Essex," an OpenStack update released last month. Fedora also includes all the necessary OpenStack components like the Horizon web interface and the Quantum virtual networking service.
As is typical of a major Fedora update, Fedora 17 packs in a ton of updates for developers, including the latest versions of scripting languages like Ruby, PHP and Python. There are also some new developer tools in Fedora 17 like the "Juno" update for the Eclipse SDK.
Among the other major backend improvements in this release is the new multitouch support. Of course there's not much you can do with that at the moment since Fedora-based tablets aren't yet rolling off the production lines. But this release links together a full multitouch stack that runs from the kernel to the X server to GTK+ 3.4. All that remains to do now is for actual applications to implement multitouch. Then the Fedora tablet production lines can fire up.
For now the idea of a Fedora tablet still sounds far-fetched. In the mean time the Fedora Project continues its tradition of solid desktop releases. Fedora 17 makes a great platform for GNOME 3 and the underlying core has the kind of small, but welcome improvements we've come to expect from a new version of Fedora.
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