Like most Linux distros, Fedora is a massive, sprawling project. Frankly, it’s sprawl-y to the point that it has felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? The distro has served as a kind of showcase for GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage. So Fedora in theory is meant to target everyday users, but at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. Does that make Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?
Today, the answer to all the above questions is “yes.” And the way to make sense of it all is what Fedora calls Fedora.Next.
Sadly, graphics are completely broken with Fedora 21 on my laptop. I have to use XRender-based compositing in kwin, because OpenGL is glitchy to the point of being nearly unusable. I haven’t tried any 3D apps, though.
However, these glitches did inspire me to to try-out OpenSUSE, which is beautiful.
Not sure why, but I’ve never used OpenSUSE before, and I am quite enamored by it.
What is the specification of your laptop? Note that is very easy to state something is broken without mentioning the component so possible users can at least try to diagnose the cause of problem. Considering your knowledge in computing world, it is surprising that you failed to provide that basic information.
Intel HD3000 + NVidia GeForce 525M (Yup. Optimus graphics)
Suddenly, I’m thinking that it was actually fixed after I updated everything after install, but I’m not sure. Either way, I’m really digging OpenSUSE, so I’m not really concerned about it. It does look like I’m going to have to do a bit extra work to get Bumblebee running with the NVidia drivers rather than Noveau, since only Bumblebee + Noveau is in the repos, but that’s no biggie. I might not even bother, since I’ve been back to using primarily Windows since October.
You can try installing http://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/ repository. I don’t know if it works for because I don’t have such hardware. Bumblebees based card are notoriously difficult according to some users.
It’s a breeze for Fedora and Ubuntu – install the repos (available via bumblee-project.org), install bbswitch, virtualgl, primus, and bumblebee-nivida.
I’ve had few problems, and they were entirely limited to running Wine apps. Running Diablo III (via Wine), for example, was a huge pain. Some applications like being run via primusrun, others like being run via optirun. When Blizzard added the Battle.Net launcher, it became very difficult – the launcher needed primusrun, and Diablo III needed optirun, which took a while to figure out, then a bit longer to figure out how to force Wine to do it.
Also, I’m surprised OSAlert doesn’t have an option for using a monospace font inline. It makes CLI commands stand out, and is a commonly used convention.
EDIT: The NVidia driver supports optimus setups on it’s own, but doesn’t do the GPU switching – everything has to be rendered via the GPU. It replaces any existing OpenGL libraries with its own.
Edited 2015-01-18 21:05 UTC
http://software.opensuse.org/package/bumblebee
Also, http://build.opensuse.org is a very nice place to search for built packages for openSuSE (and other OSes).
Direct search link: http://software.opensuse.org/search
OpenSUSE has some really nice desktop setups. It’s definitely a hidden gem.
I stopped using Fedora as my home Linux distro a couple of years ago because of the way each yum would download hundreds of MB each day in updates.
Does this still happen in Fedora 21?
Take a look at fedora-updates.repo file located on /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory and set metadata_expire to your preferred time say a week. Default is set to 6 hours on my system.
Edited 2015-01-18 02:27 UTC
Thanks, that’s solved the problem!
Yeah, it’s part of Fedora being a technology showcase/proving ground. Things get updated on a fairly quick schedule.
Crappy installer with a confusing partitioning tool.
Luckily, you only have to use it once.
No. Luckily, you can choose among many other distros.
At least now it doesn’t crash most of the time.
Yep. It’s the new anaconda. Present on RHEL7 already too.
*sigh*
It’s not horrible, exactly– it just feels like they rearranged it for the sake of rearranging things, without talking to UI experts.
It worries me how much power Fedora seems to have in terms of dictating the future path of the Linux ecosystem.
Did you want decision on the Linux ecosystem to be up for a vote?
The people who contribute the most decide where to take Linux. The way to take Linux i na significantly different direction is to contribute more than Redhat.
Please remove.
Edited 2015-01-18 15:29 UTC
With friends like this, who needs enemies? The praise that damns and snuffs any and all desire to try it. How many times does the article apologize for Gnome 3? Crappy installer but you only have to use it once? Gnome 3, but we um… [cough] We don’t use it ourselves. (Can’t stand it.) But you might! Whoopee! But if you don’t, then hey, look at all these other DE’s? How ’bout Mate? Oh, but… that great new software app? It only works in gnome. And about Nautilus. It sucks. Have you tried Nemo? etc. etc. etc…
I’ve never seen so much lipstick slathered on a pig. The poor thing is going to have to roll in a year’s worth of mud to clean it all off.
Edited 2015-01-18 19:06 UTC
The thing is, Fedora is a really nice distro as long as you stay away from Gnome3. It’s solid, and it works well as a workstation/desktop/laptop distro.
The installer is much better then it was, but the idea is still dumb.
Gnome3 is a really nice DE. It does what e17 and others were doing a decade ago, when it was okay for window managers to try new things and challenge the traditional desktop layout. I find that there is more attention to detail than KDE, and it doesn’t crash as often.
Gnome 3 classic mode leaves a lot to be desired though.
There is experimenting, and then there is making illogical choices that make no sense what so ever for the dominant form factor it will be used in.
I can see how it would be better on a touchscreen tablet, but even then it wouldn’t be good.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never like Gnome. Even Gnome2 was a sandy experience. The sand was a little bit finer in Gnome2, but there was always something that just annoyed me.
My DE preferences go: Xfce (in CDE mode especially), KDE, Enlightenment, Openbox.
or, in other words, “Fedora is a really nice distro as long as you stay away from the GUI that Fedora’s trying to showcase, and has driven most of the choices in Fedora recently”.
Unlike some other distros, Fedora doesn’t hamper the other DEs available, and it works just fine without Gnome.
KDE is excellent, Cinnamon actually works on something besides Mint, Enlightenment is works well, and Xfce is good as well.
So, yeah. Lots of good DE choices, and effort has been put into them to work well.