Fedora

Reader supplied reviews for Fedora Average rating 8.3 from 376 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Fedora? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- rawhide42-beta4140393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 41 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-03-24 Votes: 3 I've done a lot of distro hopping and I just keep coming back to Fedora. I've been a linux user for over a decade; I started on Fedora and here I am 15 years later still using it as my daily driver. Fedora is the perfect combination of latest features, available packages, and stability. The Fedora team does an incredible job of making sure that things just work while still pushing the envelope of what linux is and will be in the future. The only real issue I've had in the past is the lack of media codex which seems to be less of an issue with newer releases. Some people complain that the package manager is slow and they are kind of correct, but the important thing to me isn't the speed, it's the reliability and all you need to know is that dnf = does not fail. Overall I think Fedora is the most complete and well maintained distro out there, suitable for everyone from beginner to experienced user. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 42-beta Rating: 9 Date: 2025-03-22 Votes: 2 I tried Fedora beta with the COSMIC desktop environment, which is a new spin and a surprise given that COSMIC is at alpha 6 at the time of writing. I don't think that Fedora has ever released a spin before based on a non-production desktop environment, but there is a great deal of interest and goodwill towards COSMIC and, as it turned out, it made the right decision to support it early. Why COSMIC? I am an old Ubuntu person and not since Unity have I experienced a desktop environment which is so efficient - for my use, it simply takes fewer mouse and keyboard actions to perform a specific task than others. It is also midway between GNOME (low) and KDE (high) in the degree of customisation, which is just right. There is some muttering that it "is too much like GNOME". It certainly looks rather like it, but the "feel" is completely different. Producing and maintaining the spin is helped by COSMIC being decoupled - it is small, made up of relatively few packages, because it has little technical debt. Wayland and Pipewire, among others, are mandatory with no fallback to older technology. The installer (Anaconda) is the same as it has been for many releases and behaves in the same way. However, after the initial screens have been navigated it is a few minutes, and a reboot, to the COSMIC desktop. This has one Fedora wallpaper (which vanishes from the wallpaper chooser and cannot be picked again if you switch to one of COSMIC's wallpapers, a minor bug) but is otherwise as developed by System76. Firefox, LibreOffice, [GNOME] Disks, [GNOME] System Monitor and [GNOME] Calculator are supplied to fill in the gaps left by COSMIC's own utilities (Files, Media Player, Screenshot, Settings, Store, Terminal, Text Editor). Rather oddly, Okular [KDE] is also preinstalled to support PDF file reading; I replaced it with Papers [GNOME]. In general the COSMIC utilities are GNOME-like but, as is common throughout, have sensible defaults and their customisation options do not generally have to be changed. The Store is actually very good; it is fast and to the point and supports dnf and Flathub. An omission in COSMIC is that there is no indicator for software updates. The developers have made the correct decision not to include the rather clunky dnfdragora; either the command line or the Store can be used to check. Another minor omission is that there is no night light; this is explicitly stated as being a post-first-release option in COSMIC. Unfortunately, sct (an elegant solution) doesn't appear to be available for up-to-date versions of Fedora, so I will compile it myself. On actual use, window tiling, the best feature of the old pre-COSMIC Pop! OS, is there and working splendidly. I find the whole desktop fast, slick and well-integrated, which is a great achievement; there is nowhere I could find where a feature or appearance sticks out as inappropriate or not in keeping with the rest of the environment. I have had no crashes in two days of heavy use, which is an even more remarkable achievement for a beta operating system with an alpha desktop environment! I suspected that Fedora would do a good job here, as I have always thought that its engineering is the best of the major Linux distributions, and I was right. I see a lot of complaints about Pop! OS with COSMIC, many of which are misguided given that it is at alpha; ironically, someone else took System 76's desktop environment and stabilised it. Rating? 9. There are a few - but only a few - quirks, as is expected in an alpha version of any software, but Fedora has done a stupendous job in making a sound environment using COSMIC and it is usable day-to-day, which surprised me. It also has the assurance that, because of the semi-rolling release, alphas, betas and the final release ("epoch 1") will follow, although I have to add "eventually" to that. Developing a completely new desktop environment is as hard as it gets and the development process has been drawn out. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 42-beta Rating: 9 Date: 2025-03-22 Votes: 2 I really like this build currently dual boot with windows 11 all is going great grub did pick up windows on a separate HD , this current 42 beta is just fantastic , I suggest any one wanting to give Linux a try this is your time to try , installation was a breeze, a nice walk through as you install makes it easy , for a non computer illiterate ,for a older person thats not a guru this in my op ion is simpler then windows 11 to install , easy to use and a simple layout not over coming and confusion , just simplicity at it's best , I did install gnome tweaks to always show the taskbar , just hands down a great OS with out the telemetry of Windows, get it a try you will not be disappointed . At the current state I'm enjoying this more then windows 11.. Was this review helpful? 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