Fedora 23 review: Skip if you want stability, stay to try Linux’s bleeding edge

New default apps and Xdg support arrive, but stick to RHEL if you want long-term support.

Two releases ago, Fedora 21 introduced its namesake project’s “Fedora Next” plan. The goal was simple—bring the massive, sprawling entity that is Fedora into some neatly organized categories that would clearly define the project’s aims. And since Next launched, Fedora has been busy doing just that. The results are impressive, and it feels like the distro has found a renewed sense of purpose.

Fedora.Next design brings some order to the chaos.

Fedora Next’s structure is like a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into, and so on. On the outside are the visible layers that users interact with, what Fedora calls “Environments.”

For the recently unveiled Fedora 23, these Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server, and Cloud. It’s the same Environment trio that Fedora offered in its two prior releases. While Cloud still has the feel of an also-ran, the Workstation and Server releases see quite a few new packages. That’s especially true for the GNOME-based Workstation, and luckily the changes are largely welcome. Fedora 23 Workstation

The biggest change in Fedora 23’s default Workstation release comes in the form of GNOME 3.18. But before you get to enjoy what’s new in GNOME 3.18, you have to get Fedora installed and do whatever you have to in order to make it through the dreaded Anaconda, Fedora’s installation program.

In the Fedora 21 review, I gave Anaconda a hard time. Its button-based approach felt clunky compared to similar offerings from other distros, and sadly most of those criticisms stand with Fedora 23. For example, it still takes an extra click of the button to create a user account on the desktop when everyone installing Fedora 23 Workstation will need an account—why not just present a screen to create one?

The user creation and root password screens hidden away behind buttons.

Two things in Fedora 23 make Anaconda a bit more tolerable, though. First, it’s better at guessing defaults. For example, it successfully set my timezone and keyboard preferences with no user input at all. (That’s one win for the button-based approach since there was no need to click those buttons.) Provided you stick with single partition, the default disk partitioning setup in Fedora 23 also may not require much input on your part. The second change that makes Anaconda a bit better this time is a new orange bar across the bottom, which helps call your attention to any unfinished business you may have in the installer. For example, it happily notified me when I needed to create that user account.

It’s a marginal improvement over past releases, but ultimately I stand by my assessment. The best you can say about Fedora’s installer is that you only have to use it once.

GNOME 3.18

Once you get past Anaconda, Fedora 23 will land you in what might well be one of the nicest, and certainly one of the newest, GNOME desktops around.

Fedora 23 ships with the just-released GNOME 3.18, which is one of the best GNOME releases to date. It offers dozens of new features, better Wayland support, and a new option to update your firmware through GNOME software. But as all GNOME releases seem to, even GNOME 3.18 has a few steps backward.

The first thing you’ll likely notice when you set up Fedora 23 Workstation is the new Google Drive integration in GNOME 3.18. Google Drive joins Facebook and Microsoft in the GNOME online accounts panel (along with what I like to hope is the more popular option for Linux users, ownCloud). The new Google Drive support finally makes all your Google documents into first class citizens on the GNOME desktop.

Google Drive joins ownCloud, Microsoft, and Facebook in the GNOME online accounts dialog. Set up is just a matter of granting GNOME access to your account.

To set up Drive, all you need to do is follow the prompts to sign in to Google and authorize GNOME to access your account. In about 10 seconds, you’ll have complete access to everything in your Drive within the GNOME Files app (aka, Nautilus). Your Google Drive account is displayed as a network share in the file browser sidebar, and interacting with your Google Drive documents is no different from local documents. You can set your documents to open in any application you like (by default they’ll open in the Web editor), and creating new files and folders in Drive is just like it is for ordinary drives. Like the ownCloud integration, Google Drive in GNOME just works.

Interacting with documents stored in Google Drive is just like interacting with any other file on your machine.

There’s still no Google Drive client for Linux. For GNOME users anyway, GNOME’s integration is good enough that you won’t miss it. And if you’re not a Google Drive user, the upside is that now that Drive support is done perhaps the GNOME team can move on to integrating other online sync services.

Support for Drive isn’t the only thing new in the Files app, although it is the only thing that’s new and good. The other change, while relatively minor, is yet another step backward for usability in GNOME. The file copy dialog has been moved to a tiny icon at the top right of the file browser window. An indicator circle animates large file copy operations, and clicking the icon reveals more details and a dropdown that looks roughly like the file copy dialog you’d see in most other applications. It works quite well enough if you know it’s there. Otherwise, well, good luck finding any feedback on what your machine is doing when you drag and drop files.

If you know it’s there, the new file copy dialog isn’t so bad, but it’s certainly not easy to discover.

If you’re backing up, say, your photo folder with many gigabytes of data to an external drive, you might accidentally copy it three or perhaps even four times before you realize it. Despite the total absence of feedback, something is in fact happening. Don’t ask me how I found out, just know that you will not suffer the same because now you know—look for the tiny icon. At least GNOME is getting closer to its goal of making the command line look downright discoverable.

This release will also send you hunting for your network drives since those no longer appear in the sidebar by default. In the words of GNOME’s announcement, this was done to “reduce clutter.” But those drives now require an extra click on the new “Other Locations” menu item, which will reveal all that unsightly clutter should you actually need to access those cluttered drives.

Networked drives, known as ‘clutter’ in GNOME parlance, are now hidden behind ‘Other Locations’ in the sidebar.

There is one other actual improvement of note in the UI of GNOME 3.18: you can now search by typing in open and save dialogs. (One step forward, two back.) Most of the other big changes in Fedora 23 and GNOME 3.18 are less visible though more welcome.

Fedora has long been an early adopter of Wayland, and Fedora 23 is no different, offering considerably more support than any other distro to date. In fact, the Wayland support is getting close enough to feature-complete that it appears Fedora 24 may boot to Wayland by default. By and large you won’t notice much difference should you try out Wayland in Fedora 23 (just log out of your current session and select Wayland from the menu that drops down from the gear icon at the lower right side of the login dialog). This lack of noticeable difference is a good thing, since you really shouldn’t need to know what your display manager is up to, but there are some new features available if you need them.

The most notable thing Wayland can do right now is run DPI-independent monitors. That is, if you have a normal resolution display and something more like a 4K display, Wayland can handle that scenario. Not having a high-res monitor, I haven’t been able to test this one, but the GNOME forums are full of success reports. Other new Wayland-specific features include trackpad support for gestures like pinch-to-zoom, twirling to rotate, and four-finger swipes to switch workspaces. All of these gestures were previously available if you had a touchscreen, but they’re now available to supported trackpads under Wayland. That said, I wasn’t personally able to get them working in Fedora 23.

Fedora 23 does support GNOME 3.18’s new “automatic brightness” support, which taps your laptop’s integrated light sensor to automatically dim and brighten the screen based on the lighting around you. It saves fiddling with the brightness buttons and can help cut down on power use. However, if you’re really trying to eke the last bit out of your battery, you’ll probably want to disable automatic screen brightness in the power settings since it tends to err on the brighter side. Most of the time, though, this feature works well.

There are quite a few notable updates for GNOME’s stock applications and two brand new applications—Calendar and GNOME To Do. However, possibly the best addition is that GNOME Software now supports firmware updates via fwupd. That means you don’t need any proprietary tools or original install DVDs just to update your firmware, provided of course that the firmware you need is available via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.

GNOME Software can now update firmware.

As a side note for Ubuntu users, take a good look at GNOME software because it’s in your future. Canonical has decided to abandon its homegrown software center in favor of GNOME software for Ubuntu 16.04. First Upstart gave way to systemd, then Unity 8 moved to Qt, then the scrollbars went to stock GNOME, and now the Ubuntu Software Center is abandoned in favor of GNOME Software. It makes you wonder about Mir.

But let’s get back to GNOME 3.18’s two new default apps, Calendar and GNOME To Do. The lack of a good GUI calendar app for Linux has always been puzzling. There’s Evolution, of course, but until now there hasn’t really been a nice, simple stand-alone Calendar app. GNOME Calendar is that app, or rather, it’s close to being that app. If you stick with the integrated GNOME online accounts (Google Calendar, ownCloud, etc), Calendar works as expected. Regrettably, I have not been able to get it working with any of my CalDav servers, including my primary calendar which resides on Fastmail’s CalDav servers. Enlarge / GNOME Calendar, simple but functional—provided your online calendar resides in one of GNOME’s supported online account options.

Not to be confused with the older, independent application launcher called GNOME-Do, GNOME To Do is just what the name suggests—a to-do list manager. GNOME To Do is still a “technical preview” in GNOME 3.18, but it has most of what you’d want in a task manager application. You can enter new tasks, group them, add colors and priorities, and attach notes. Tasks also integrate and sync with, for example, Gmail’s Tasks. It was perfectly stable in my testing (including syncing with Gmail), but bear in mind that it is still a preview release. To be safe, you might not want to trust your entire life schedule to it just yet.

GNOME To Do, a nice, if still experimental, task manager.

I should also note that while Fedora mentions both new GNOME apps in its release notes, in the case of the live CD I used to install Fedora 23, neither were installed by default. They’re both in the repos, but, thanks to GNOME’s helpful ability to search for apps not installed, they’re easy enough to install on your own.

The last big update of note in Fedora 23’s GNOME desktop is support for what’s likely the biggest change coming soon to the GNOME world: the Xdg project. Xdg is a new effort designed to help developers build and distribute Linux applications. Ultimately, Xdg wants to be a kind of one-package-to-rule-them-all that developers can use to package apps across distros. Xdg will also add some much stricter application sandboxing.

In Fedora 23, Xdg is not much more than an outline. None of the apps that ship in Fedora’s repos are packaged this way yet, but Xdg does indeed look to be part of the GNOME roadmap. This likely means Fedora will be an early adopter as Xdg expands.

Kernel

Like the recently released Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 ships with Linux Kernel 4.2. The biggest news in 4.2 is support for recent Radeon GPUs and Intel’s new Broxton chips, though let’s face it—Fedora running on mobile chips is about as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop.

On the more useful side, there are some new encryption options for ext4 disks and the new live kernel patching features. The encryption features should make using whole disk encryption a bit faster.

Other under-the-hood changes in Fedora 23 include some improvements for Fedora’s new DNF package manager, which replaced Yum a few releases ago (Yum is aliased to DNF now). With this release, DNF takes over from fedup, becoming the new way to perform system upgrades. Aside from the welcome unification of purpose—that Fedora had to build a separate tool for system upgrades says something about Yum—DNF’s new upgrade support hooks into systemd’s support for offline updates and allows you to easily roll back updates if necessary. Server

Fedora 23 Server includes everything found in the Workstation release (minus the desktop itself) and layers in some great tools for sysadmins, most notably Cockpit. Cockpit is Fedora’s effort to bring the tools of the sysadmin into an interface anyone can use. Want to deploy a Docker container? Search for what you want, click install, and you’re done.

Cockpit also feels a bit like a covert effort to build a more secure Web since it makes deploying secure servers something that anyone with a bit of Linux experience can figure out. Cockpit is really just a graphical interface layered on top of the often inscrutable tools sysadmins already use. It adds a welcome layer of abstraction. So while Cockpit isn’t a substitute for experience, it can point you in the right direction.

Fedora 23 Server beefs up Cockpit security with support for SSH key authentication and the ability to configure user accounts with authorized keys.

In this release, Fedora rolekit gains the ability to deploy Server Roles as containerized applications. This allows better isolation of roles from the rest of the system and paves the way for roles to migrate into cloud-based systems like Fedora’s Project Atomic. Conclusion

Fedora 23 is such a strong release that it highlights what feels like Fedora’s Achilles heel—there’s no Long Term Support release.

If you want an LTS release in the Red Hat world, it’s RHEL you’re after (or CentOS and other derivatives). Fedora is a bleeding edge, and as such Fedora 23 will, as always, be supported for 12 months. After that time, you’ll need to upgrade.

The good news is that DNF’s new upgrade tools with transactional updates and rollbacks temper the missing LTS release a bit. After all, if updating is simple, and you can roll back if something goes wrong, then there’s less risk to updating. Still, what if you do need to rollback because something went wrong? What if that something isn’t something you can quickly fix?

The lack of an LTS release isn’t likely to stop desktop users, but it does make Fedora feel like a riskier bet on the server. In the end, that’s probably how Red Hat likes things. If you want stable, RHEL is there. If you want the latest and greatest, Fedora 23 delivers.