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The Fedora Project has released the final version of Fedora 21.
As has become par for the course with Fedora releases, this one is a couple months late, but it is at least, well worth the wait.
This release marks the start of the Fedora.next project. The big change is that Fedora 21 is available in three "flavors": Cloud, Server, and Workstation. All three build out from the same base, adding packages relevant to the individual use case. For this review I tested both the Server and Workstation options, but primarily the latter since that's the flavor targeted at desktop users.
While I did not test it, the Cloud variant will no doubt have appeal for those running large virtual server installations. It uses a modular kernel image that is about 25 percent smaller than images required on physical hardware. The Cloud flavor is available preconfigured for OpenStack, Amazon AMIs and "Atomic" images intended for running Docker containers.
Given the shared base system underlying these new flavors, I was hoping there might be a plain, "base" flavor -- something akin to Debian's Minimal install, that would allow you to build a more customized desktop. But so far that's not something Fedora is doing. In fact, the Fedora project emphasizes that the base set of packages is "not intended for use on its own".
There are of course plenty of other Fedora spins, including a very nice one based on the MATE desktop.
Fedora 21 Workstation installed without a hitch, though the installer was considerably less elegant than the Mint 17.1 installer that I tested just prior to the release of Fedora 21.
Fedora claims that it has simplified the installer down to just "selecting the layout of your physical media, and then pressing 'Install'". That's true if you already know it's true, but it's not terribly discoverable. Fedora elects for a series of buttons, rather than the animated walk-through you get with Mint or Ubuntu or even OS X and Windows. With Fedora's installer it isn't immediately clear what you need to do, or even that you need to do something, until you click each button and find out, which ruins the "select your layout" and install simplicity. It's not that bad; it's not like installing Arch, but it did leave me wondering -- why? Why not just go with the familiar, narrative-like sliding screen animation that, well, pretty much every other OS out there uses?
If the installation criticisms seem nitpicky, it might be because once you get past them there's not a lot wrong with Fedora 21.
Once you get Workstation installed the first thing you'll see is GNOME 3.14, a huge leap forward from the last official Fedora release, which used GNOME 3.10. Since that time GNOME has added several new apps, reworked the default theme and improved its HiDPI screen support among other things.
GNOME continues to have one the best looking interfaces on HiDPI screens and this release is no exception. This time around GNOME has been polishing the smaller bits and fixing a few inconsistencies and bugs that plague the previous release. If you're coming all the way from GNOME 3.10, the HiDPI support in this release will be a welcome upgrade.
The theme improvements in 3.14 include a completely redesigned Weather app that taps into the new GNOME geolocation API to automatically find your location and display the forecast. Also note that the longstanding default Video player, Totem, has been renamed simply, "Videos".
GNOME 3.14 has some other app updates as well, notably the GNOME Photos app. The new Photos app is not installed by default in Fedora 21, you'll find the old standby, Shotwell, instead. Photos is available via the Fedora repositories though and I suggest giving it a try. GNOME 3.14 has added support for Google accounts to Photos, so you can browse images uploaded from Android devices, through Google+, or via Picasa. That's in addition to the existing support for Flickr and Facebook. The app can also access any local photo servers using DLNA (several popular NAS servers for example). That said, Photos still has some bugs, so I would use it for browsing online accounts and stick with whatever you use now for actually editing your local images.
Perhaps the biggest news in GNOME 3.14 though is what's under the hood -- better support for Wayland. In GNOME 3.14 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.
That goes for GNOME 3.14 at large too. If early versions of GNOME turned you to another desktop, I don't blame you, but with this release GNOME has actually become very nice -- it's interface is well polished and does a good job of staying out of the way until you need. It's worth another look if you haven't tried it in a while and Fedora 21 makes a great base to test it with.
Fedora 21 ships with the 3.17 series Linux kernel, which has support for a few notable new pieces of hardware, like the XBox One controller (sans vibrate), "free fall" detectors for dropped laptops and tons of bug fixes for ARM machines.
Other highlights in Fedora 21 include some SystemD updates (seriously), a new sysadmin tool for servers, dubbed <a href="http://cockpit-project.org/">Cockpit</a> and quite a bit more. For the full details on everything that's new in Fedora 21, be sure to check out the <a href=http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/21/html/Release_Notes/">release notes</a>.
If it's been a while since you took either GNOME or Fedora for a spin, Fedora 21 makes a great release to test with. For those already running Fedora this should make for a welcome upgrade.
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