Fedora 21-1 family of Fedora.next . Fedora 21

After almost a year published a new version of Fedora. In addition to news in the distribution itself, there is one significant change, and that is the distribution of Fedora Workstation, Server and Cloud. In this review I will Workstation product. What's new and what to expect in the future?

For users of Fedora 21, the transition to a Workstation practically nothing changes - the default GNOME environment will remain for the time being and does not change either the default application. More on essentially the initiative Fedora.next can listen to the recording of the presentation Jerky Eichmann conference LinuxDays 2014 YouTube.

Installation and first steps.

We get to the actual distribution. After starting welcomes GNOME 3.14.2 in the latest version. Change is also quite a lot because of previous releases of Fedora included GNOME 3.10, so the promotion this time skip GNOME 3.12 What do you notice? Maybe Totem, video applications, has been renamed to videos, as well as a lot of improvements and changes occurred in the Weather app and Software.

GNOME software can now be easily used to manage software updates, as well as his. The application is brisk, clear and appealing, includes features such as the evaluation of applications gallery of screenshots and more. Lots of changes took place in the window manager Mutter. In addition to optimizing (which can be felt especially on older machines) and bug fixes are now able to act as Wayland compositor. I recommend you read the reviews GNOME 3.12 and 3.14, which gives you an overview of what to expect from GNOME 3.14.

Fedora 21, at first glance, a new wallpaper

Fedora 21 is aimed primarily at developers, for which the new version also plenty of news. In contrast to other distributions then extends mainly DevAssistant, which compared to the version included in Fedora 20 has made enormous strides. With its help, you easily set up a development environment for a plethora of languages and must be equal to or for the development of mobile applications. Of course, there are the then current version of Python, Ruby, PHP and more.

DevAssistant help with the preparation of a development environment

KDE and the others.

Few changes occurred even when other graphical environments. The repositories are already available KDE Frameworks 5, which serves as a basis for Plasma 5. The change was available in the repositories is not yet, but its installation is very simple and just add just one COPR Dana returned. Among other known environments must Mate elevated to version 1.8 and Cinnamon 4.2 In both cases this is more of bug fixes and optimizations. Added the packages for LXQt, but it is still impossible due to unresolved dependencies installed.

KDE

What's new under the hood?

In addition to the evident at first glance, news is that a lot has changed even in the very "core". Indeed, since the release of Fedora 20 has passed almost a year and it is in Linux a very long time. Some packages have been updated, of course, even in older Fedora, but many of them are simply frozen and except security patches were not updated. Fedora 21 thus comes with the latest version of the Linux kernel 3.17, X Server 1.16.1 (1.14.4 versus Fedora 20) and an updated Mesa library to the latest version 3.10

It brings particular standard OpenGL 3.3 support and many bug fixes and performance enhancements. I got to the 2D driver updates. Perhaps the latest version of the driver for Intel graphics card by default uses a new architecture for rendering - SNA place UXA. The differences in performance are striking across the spectrum of supported chips.

I would also like to remind the user "prehistoric" graphic to remove support for some outdated video drivers (specifically APM, Cirrus, Glint, i128, i740, Mach64, MGA, Neomagic, R128, Rendition, S3virge, Savage, SiliconMotion, SiS, tx and Trident ) . Users of these cards will have X Server along with the appropriate driver compile yourself.

Fedora 21 Graphics Stack Updates (Francois, CC-BY)

News is for long twelve months really a lot and even more are planned for next year. If you are not an owner of a graphic artist, whose support was removed, so I have no reason to postpone the update. Fedora 21 is a nice update, please.

Due to several delays were corrected many errors and it is almost impossible to discover any. In case you have an unsupported graphics, so it's probably best way to transition CentOS 7, which as a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and supports these chips will be maintained for several years. Support for Fedora 20 will probably end up next year all ready.

What to expect next?

In conclusion, I would still allow to talk about the changes that we can expect in future releases. In the foreseeable future, Fedora waits transition to the package manager def, which will replace the already aging and slow yellow dog Updater, Modified. Alone it for almost a year and currently I am using it missing any features and is compared with the Yuma noticeably faster.

And of course Wayland, which already in Fedora 21 works great and you practically can not notice a difference compared to the X Server. The biggest problem is the current lack of support in enclosed graphics driver, AMD, and NVIDIA. The latter company has to support this protocol probably closer because he has implemented support for interface EGL, which is a necessity for Wayland.

MATE environment you prefer?

I would not expect that in Fedora 22 Wayland appears as the default option, but in a year in Fedora 23 it is not entirely unlikely. In the longer term, we can expect software collections, kdbus, and support sandboxing.

Fedora should also come twice a year - every May and October. Appeared a proposal to adopt a similar strategy issue, which Intel applies for its processors - Tick-Tock. Always the first edition of this new feature and others may target a more conservative users who demand complete reliability rather than new features. On how it would turn out, however, we will have to wait.

Sorce: Linux.com image:linuxexpres