A New Release From Fedora

Today is the day that Fedora 24 has been released!

It's kind of a big deal at Red Hat, since Fedora is the upstream from which many things flow. So, as such, it's a community release that gets a lot of attention both within Red Hat, and without.

I actually had the opportunity to clean-install Fedora 24 Beta last week—not that I am some Fedora über-fan or anything. No, this was a necessity brought on by a dead hard drive. Thank goodness for cloud backups... one new drive later and I was installing Fedora 24 from a live USB.

The experience itself was nothing notable, in that I had enough bad experiences with Xconfigurator and snapping CRT monitors to still make my subconsciously twitchy whenever I do a full install. Silly, yes, but I was poor in those days. So "not notable" is high praise indeed.

If you weren't aware, Fedora comes in three distinct releases, each maintained by workgroups in the Fedora community: Workstation, Server, and Cloud.

I opted, as usual, for the Workstation release, which features GNOME 3.20 and, if you want to try it the X replacement Wayland. (X is still installed by default.) Working with the interface is a pure joy, I have to say, with excellent keyboard shortcut support that I have really come to appreciate lately. Not reaching for the mouse all the time is a blessing to this, er, distinguished man's wrists.

App support and installation is great, and I am looking forward to the implementation of Flatpak (née xdg-app), which was not formally included in the Fedora 24 release today, but was released on its own on the same day. I don't need multiple Linux distros as much anymore now that I am not a reviewer and tech journalist, but I feel like firing up some virtual machines with other distros running so I can see Flatpak in action.

Speaking of VMs, I will probably be loading up additional machines on my oVirt server soon for the Server and Cloud releases to start exploring those.

Circumstances afford me the opportunity to fresh-install Fedora 24, but if you are running Fedora 23, you can easily upgrade you system today.

It has been said that Fedora 24 is an "interim" release, on its way to a new generation of Linux distribution that will highlight modularity, flexibility, and security. After working with the latest the Fedora Project has to offer, I would say that Fedora 24 stands on its own as a powerful platform to get things done wherever your jobs are.

(Fedora desktop image courtesy Corey Sheldon, (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported))