news
Review: Fedora 45
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Fedora is a testing ground for new technologies, essentially a beta arena for IBM with community elements in the mix. As a result the project is often trialing new technologies before anyone else and Fedora users are likely to experience some new, incomplete, or buggy behaviour. This is to be expected, it comes with the territory of running a cutting edge distribution.
What might be less expected is how chaotic the design and implementation of Fedora tends to be. It regularly feels like none of the developers have communicated with any of the other developers or coordinated through the project manager. As a small example of this, half the questions first-run wizard asks us are the same questions the system installer asks us. In another instance the Discover software tells us we need to reboot to apply updates when A) this is not true and B) the software centre hasn't even successfully fetched the new packages. I don't mind so much when an application fails in task, but it shouldn't lie to the user about its status and what steps to take.
I had a similar reaction when, while logged in as a regular user, the shell offered to install missing packages for me, even showing me what dependencies it planned to fetch, and then quit with a vague error. If regular users cannot install extra packages then why tease them with the offer? In a similar vein, why include debug tools while not including a compiler? This choice seems backwards. Likewise, why default to running Btrfs as the root filesystem with no boot environment or snapshot tools included? Not having snapshot management removes almost all of the benefit to running Btrfs.
I've used Fedora before so I'm familiar with the project's stance on software inclusion and licensing, but for someone who is less familiar with Fedora, it's surprisingly hard to find out which applications are available if we choose to "enable third-party repositories". The linked documentation talks about "filtered Flathub", but I had to dig through multiple wiki pages and change proposals to confirm what separated Fedora's "filtered" experience from plain Flathub. It feels like the project is intentionally hiding information from the users when the documentation is this scattered and vague.