Hello everyone! This is Mat here, writing another technology related blog as a way to vent out and complain a bit. As Fedora 25 is reaching EoL, I thought it would be nice to write about Fedora 27.
I've been running Fedora 27 since its official release date (two weeks tomorrow), the upgrade process from F26 was pretty much flawless besides some small quirks with xfce4-terminal losing its font and dnfdragora crashing due to some icon issue, the former was easily fixed while I didn't care enough about the latter, so I just disabled it from startup (I would rather run dnf for upgrades myself). If it wasn't for those small quirks, I would say that the upgrade path for it is as good as Debian's.
So what did this upgrade bring new to the table? For a desktop user, not much, just updated packages, PipeWire (apparently GNOME only? Didn't notice a thing) and a new version of GNOME (which doesn't affect me, as I am running my handy Xfce setup), there was some interesting development in the server area as they keep pushing their modularization concept ahead, I find it pretty cool but I kinda worry how it is going to affect their desktop down the road. A cool thing about this release was the fact that it was the first Linux distro to ship Firefox 57, which I highly recommend checking out even if you are a hardcore Chrome user.
Sadly, this upgrade didn't solve two major issues I had with Fedora 26, which hurts my workflow in a petty, but annoying way. The first issue is power management, for some reason, my laptop always suspend when I close the lid, ignoring completely what settings I set up in Xfce's power manager. I need my laptop to lock the screen if closed while charging, as I use it as a "low power" download box while I'm sleeping, or just to avoid dirt on it while I am away for some time. The second issue is hibernation, if I try to hibernate it, it will boot up and load a blank desktop like a normal shutdown, apparently this is caused due to the lack of a "resume" flag in GRUB pointing to the swap partition from what I have seen in Bugzilla. I plan on fixing that down the road later, as I don't use hibernation often, but for a stable and mature distro, it is ridiculous to have that kind of issue in 2017.
So that is it for Fedora! It is arguably the only distro that fits my needs atm (stable but cutting edge && not Arch), unless I go back to Debian and use its Testing branch, but I want something a bit more stable. If at least I could fix the issue with power management, it would be perfect for my use case. Solus piqued my interest but without Xfce, I am not sure if I would use it, unless MATE is as flexible and reliable as Xfce.
As something not related directly to Fedora, the RetroArch flatpak is still broken for keyboard users reeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
I've been running Fedora 27 since its official release date (two weeks tomorrow), the upgrade process from F26 was pretty much flawless besides some small quirks with xfce4-terminal losing its font and dnfdragora crashing due to some icon issue, the former was easily fixed while I didn't care enough about the latter, so I just disabled it from startup (I would rather run dnf for upgrades myself). If it wasn't for those small quirks, I would say that the upgrade path for it is as good as Debian's.
So what did this upgrade bring new to the table? For a desktop user, not much, just updated packages, PipeWire (apparently GNOME only? Didn't notice a thing) and a new version of GNOME (which doesn't affect me, as I am running my handy Xfce setup), there was some interesting development in the server area as they keep pushing their modularization concept ahead, I find it pretty cool but I kinda worry how it is going to affect their desktop down the road. A cool thing about this release was the fact that it was the first Linux distro to ship Firefox 57, which I highly recommend checking out even if you are a hardcore Chrome user.
Sadly, this upgrade didn't solve two major issues I had with Fedora 26, which hurts my workflow in a petty, but annoying way. The first issue is power management, for some reason, my laptop always suspend when I close the lid, ignoring completely what settings I set up in Xfce's power manager. I need my laptop to lock the screen if closed while charging, as I use it as a "low power" download box while I'm sleeping, or just to avoid dirt on it while I am away for some time. The second issue is hibernation, if I try to hibernate it, it will boot up and load a blank desktop like a normal shutdown, apparently this is caused due to the lack of a "resume" flag in GRUB pointing to the swap partition from what I have seen in Bugzilla. I plan on fixing that down the road later, as I don't use hibernation often, but for a stable and mature distro, it is ridiculous to have that kind of issue in 2017.
So that is it for Fedora! It is arguably the only distro that fits my needs atm (stable but cutting edge && not Arch), unless I go back to Debian and use its Testing branch, but I want something a bit more stable. If at least I could fix the issue with power management, it would be perfect for my use case. Solus piqued my interest but without Xfce, I am not sure if I would use it, unless MATE is as flexible and reliable as Xfce.
As something not related directly to Fedora, the RetroArch flatpak is still broken for keyboard users reeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
