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The Fedora project has released the first beta version of the coming Fedora 21.
As has become regrettably typical for the Fedora project, the first Fedora 21 beta is well behind schedule. According to the current schedule on the <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Schedule">Fedora wiki</a>, the final version will arrive about a month late, on December 9. That is if nothing goes wrong during the beta testing phase that's just started.
A month might not sound so bad, but it's been nearly 12 months since Fedora 20 arrived, which is not good for a distro that supposedly updates every six months.
There has been talk of moving Fedora to a more Ubuntu-like schedule of regular, calendar-based released. That would mean new versions of Fedora arrive in May and October rather than just six months after the last release, but so far that hasn't been officially adopted.
Whatever the case, unlike some recent versions of Fedora, Fedora 21 looks like it will be worth the wait.
This release is <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/ChangeSet">chock full of new features</a>, but the two most noticeable if you grab the live CD will be GNOME 3.14 and support for the Wayland protocol.
GNOME 3.14 packs in a ton of new stuff, especially since the last release of Fedora used the now-ancient GNOME 3.10. Since then GNOME has greatly improved its support for HiDPI screens, revamped the default theme (which Fedora 21 uses) and reworked its software center app. It also renamed Totem, so if you're trying to figure out where Totem is, search for it by its new name, "Videos".
The theme improvements include a completely reworked Weather app that taps into the new GNOME geolocation API. You'll also find some new Google-based options for online accounts so you can pull in all your photos from Picasa, Google+, or your Android device.
The big news in GNOME 3.14 though is what's under the hood -- better support for Wayland. Wayland is not, contrary to widespread internet belief, a new display server. In fact it's a protocol. What's new in 3.14 is that Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can now work as a Wayland compositor.
If you'd like to test out GNOME running under Wayland, click the gear icon on the GNOME login screen and choose the option "GNOME on Wayland". GNOME on Wayland is still very rough around the edges and there are a number of apps that won't work with Wayland (some of which might never be ported to use the Wayland protocol), but I was impressed by the amount of stuff that actually works quite well.
The fallback to XWayland for unsupported apps -- notably GNOME Terminal -- is largely seamless though there are some jittery graphics when resizing windows (in fairness the jitteriness in XWayland may be more noticeable because of how smooth window resizing is in Wayland).
The other big gotcha -- and the reason you don't see any screenshots -- is that you can't take screenshots in Wayland GNOME sessions just yet. Unlike X, Wayland tightly sandboxes apps. That's good for security, but it currently means cross-app tools like, for example, screen capture and color picker apps don't work. The plan is to add an API for an app to ask for permission to access resources outside the app, but that hasn't been implemented yet. For full details on some other missing features and bugs, check out Fedora Magazine's write up in <a href="http://fedoramagazine.org/gnome-on-wayland-in-fedora-21/">Wayland in Fedora 21</a>.
For now I suggest sticking with a regular GNOME session (which is the default in Fedora 21 beta), but if you'd like to see how Wayland is coming along it's easy to do in this release.
Fedora isn't just about GNOME of course, there are plenty of other desktop options to choose from including updates for KDE and the MATE desktop. The KDE spin ships with KDE Frameworks 5 and the MATE spin has been updated to MATE 1.8.
As per usual with the Fedora Project, this release includes a slew of updates aimed at software developers. Python and Ruby have both been updated and Fedora 21 also includes the awesome <a href="http://devassistant.org/">DevAssistant</a> -- a tool that allows developers to quickly get new projects up and running with development environments tailored to their needs. DevAssistant has always been just a yum install away, but packing it into the default applications shows Fedora hasn't lost its love of software developers.
This Fedora 21 beta has been remarkably stable in my testing, but it is of course a beta so proceed with caution.
I do encourage you to take it for a spin in at least a virtual machine though, especially if it's been a while since you used Fedora. Overall this is shaping up to be perhaps the best Fedora release in quite some time. If the project can get past the routine delays that have plague the last couple of release cycles Fedora might be able to offer a compelling desktop alternative to the popular, but currently mobile-centric, Ubuntu.
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