Linux Tutorials

Fedora 22 Beta initial thoughts

So I downloaded Fedora 22 beta upon release and decided to install it on my Aienware which has been having problems with some drivers under earlier releases. I am also keen to see the new UI change and improvements to Gnome integrations (Self Confessed Gnome FanGirl).

Not to much I did different then a base install, I partitioned my drives to mount / and /home in separate partitions. The main reason behind doing this is separation of working files and operating system files. The other thing I do for a workstation is add a user (my own account) and make that an administrator account.

Connected Windows Live and Google both connected as a messenger service and in evolution as a mail client without any work on my behalf apart from supplying my credentials. I also connected FaceBook which will display notifications, sadly no Twitter yet :-/

The UI changes are minor but noticeable, and I mean that in a a good way. The notifications tab is now integrated into the calendar so when you click on the calendar it drops down and shows a calendar, world clocks (you can add a world clock) on the right and to the left of the display is the notifications area. The annoying thing is that if you chose to not include online applications by default it shows no notifications and does not hide when there is none. I found this to be annoying and a change I would like to see aka if there is a notification it can expand to show? I guess the premise is with social networking you will always have a notification? Mind you the default Gnome shell has the Calendar on the left and your daily notifications on the right which is even less useful to your average user who is highly unlikely to use the built in calendering system as most people control tis from their phones these days.

Anyways that is minor the fact that SE Linux warnings have been brought into the notification bar is awesome news as it makes them a lot more visible especially for newcomers and SELinux can be a gotcha for new Linux users as well as Ubuntu users who start using Fedora. I think the inclusion of the messages in the top bar will mean there will be more users who will notice and hopefully not be worried to action.

Overall I really like the UI changes and the start-up and wake times are beautiful and definitely noticeable faster. The other thing was that for my Alienware MX14 (2013 model) al my hardware was detected and working and under Fedora21 I had sound and network driver issues :-/

I will be reporting on my use of Fedora 22 for the moment I am enjoying the small time I have spent playing around and getting use to dnf, which so far in my small use has just meant calling dnf install instead of yum install. I will aim to do a small blog post on the new dnf implementation and how I have found making the switch.